Featured Artists
Tanya Ekanayaka
Dr Tanya Ekanayaka is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning Sri Lankan-British concert composer-pianist. Although trained as a pianist, her compositional skills are the result of a purely intuitive and natural development. Influenced by her multifaceted background, multilingualism, ambidexterity and partial colour synaesthesia her works which she describes as ‘deeply autobiographical’ and which evolve when she is at the piano (and at times in her dreams), have not been scored in any form but remain precisely frozen in her memory once evolved. Consistent with her interdisciplinary background, she holds a doctorate for interdisciplinary research involving Linguistics and Musicology from The University of Edinburgh, where she has also been engaged part time in academic teaching since 2007, as well as advanced academic and professional qualifications in Music Performance, Linguistics and Literature.
Nicolas Horvath
Nicolas Horvath began his studies at the Académie de Musique Prince Rainier III de Monaco and at the age of 16 caught the attention of the American conductor Lawrence Foster, who helped him to secure a three-year scholarship from the Princess Grace Foundation. His mentors include distinguished international pianists Bruno Leonardo Gelber, Gérard Frémy, Eric Heidsieck, Gabriel Tacchino, Nelson Delle-Vigne, Philippe Entremont, Oxana Yablonskaya and Liszt specialist Leslie Howard, who helped Horvath to establish himself as a leading interpreter of Liszt’s music. He holds several awards, including first prize from the Alexander Scriabin and the Luigi Nono competitions. Horvath has programmed several complete cycles, sometimes lasting over twelve hours. These include performances of Erik Satie’s complete piano music at the Paris Philharmonie before a cumulative audience of 14,000 people; Stockhausen’s (15) Klavierstücke; and the complete piano music of Philip Glass. His discography on Grand Piano includes the highly acclaimed Philip Glass solo piano music edition, Glassworlds; the complete piano works of Erik Satie; piano sonatas by the Estonian composer Jaan Rääts and music by the American experimental composer Alvin Lucier; Carl Czerny’s 30 Études; and lesser-known piano music by Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy and Claude Debussy.
Hiroko Ishimoto
Born in Sapporo, Japan, Hiroko Ishimoto studied at the Toho Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo, where she went on to lecture, and The Juilliard School in New York where her professor was György Sándor, the great Hungarian-American pianist and leading pupil of Béla Bartók. Highly acclaimed by The New York Times and Japanese magazine The World of Music, Ishimoto also devotes time to her piano students, and currently resides in Budapest.
The Cultural Ministry of Japan invited Ishimoto to perform at concerts for children affected by the Fukushima tsunami from 2011 to 2015, and she is an active member of the Women’s Action Network (WAN) in Japan. Her series of essays and performances on YouTube of Women Composers in the Shadows of Men has garnered worldwide attention, and she gave Japanese concert tours of these works organised by WAN in 2017 and 2018. She regularly gives performances of this project in Hungary and Japan.
Ishimoto has released two albums in Japan, My Favorites and Hungary and Beyond. Japanese radio station NHK FM broadcast Hiroko’s performance of works by Amy Beach nationwide on 1 January 2017. She has been interviewed in major Japanese newspapers the Yomiuri Shimbun and the Asahi Shimbun professional qualifications in Music Performance, Linguistics and Literature.
Alexander Kostritsa
Alexander Kostritsa was born into a musical family in Moscow and started his piano lessons at the age of six. He received his Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, and his Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music. Alexander Kostritsa is a prizewinner of international piano competitions, including the Premio Rovere d’Oro (Italy, 2007, 1st prize), the Slavic Music Festival (Ukraine, 2007, laureate), and the Paul Badura-Skoda (Spain, 2010, finalist). He made his international début when he was eight years old with a concert tour to Japan. Since then he has been performing as a soloist in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, South Korea, and the United States. He has appeared with the Moscow Chamber Orchestra “The Seasons”, the Kursk University Orchestra, the Vidin Philharmonic and other orchestras. He studied with Mikhail Petukhov in Moscow and with Antonio Pompa-Baldi in Cleveland.
Giorgio Koukl
Giorgio Koukl is a pianist/harpsichordist and composer. He was born in Prague in 1953, and studied there at the State Music School and Conservatory. He continued his studies at both the Conservatories of Zürich and Milan, where he took part in the masterclasses of Nikita Magaloff, Jacques Février and Stanislas Neuhaus, and with Rudolf Firkušný, friend and advocate of Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů. It was through Firkušný that Koukl first encountered Martinů‘s music, prompting him to search out his compatriot’s solo piano works. Since then he has developed these into an important part of his concert repertoire and is now considered one of the world’s leading interpreters of Martinů‘s piano music, having recorded that composer’s complete solo piano music, together with five discs of Martinů‘s vocal music and two discs of his piano concertos. As a logical continuation of this work, Koukl has recorded the complete solo piano works of Paul Le Flem, Alexander Tcherepnin, Arthur Lourié, Vítězslava Kaprálová, Witold Lutosławski, and, more recently, Alexandre Tansman, Tibor Harsányi and Alfons Szczerbiński.
Alexandra Oehler
Alexandra Oehler studied with Ulrich Urban at the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy University of Music and Theatre in Leipzig. She completed her artistic postgraduate studies with a master’s degree and has won several piano competitions, including the International Franz Liszt Competition, Weimar. Concert tours have taken her to North America (Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles), Manila (Cultural Center of the Philippines), Mexico (Teatro de la Ciudad de Mexico), Chile (Teatro de la Universidad, Santiago) and to South Africa (Cape Town City Hall). She has also given concerts in European countries and in East Asia. Since the late 1980s she has made a name for herself as a pianist at prestigious national and international festivals such as the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, MDR-Musiksommer, Heidelberger Frühling, Mendelssohn Festival, Leipzig, Budapest Spring Festival, Music Festival Tropea and the Cervo Music Festival in Liguria. Alexandra Oehler performs as soloist, chamber musician and accompanist. Frequent musical partners include the violinist Gunnar Harms, cellist Nicolas Defranoux, violinist Stefan Arzberger (Leipzig String Quartet). Alexandra Oehler has also accompanied the St Thomas Choir of Leipzig under the direction of Georg Christoph Biller on concert tours. She boasts a wide range of spectacular recordings, and television productions in co-operation with the German broadcasting station ARD. In 2008 her portrait was included in PianistenProfile (Bärenreiter Verlag).
Sara Aimée Smiseth
Sara Aimée Smiseth was born in 1986 in Oslo, Norway. She pursued her musical education at the Norwegian Academy of Music and the Royal Conservatory of Brussels with professors Einar Steen-Nøkleberg, Einar Henning Smebye and Jan Michiels. She also has a bachelor’s degree in musicology from the University of Oslo. She has toured Scandinavia as well as the United States and Canada giving lecture recitals – a combination of virtuoso piano playing and captivating storytelling. She regularly plays with some of Norway’s foremost choirs and is also a pianist and a lecturer at the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet. This is her first recorded solo album.
