Serouj Kradjian
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Juno award winning Armenian- Canadian pianist Serouj Kradjian has been described as "a keyboard acrobat" of "crystal virtuosity", having "fiery temperament and elegant sound" with "a technique to burn."
Mr. Kradjian's concert performances have included Rachmaninoff's Second and Third Piano Concerti with the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra, the Shostakovitch First Concerto in Madrid, both Liszt Piano Concertos with Germany's Göttingen Symphony, the Khachaturian Piano Concerto in Toronto, Mozart performances with the Vancouver and Edmonton Symphonies, and his recital debut at Carnegie Hall, New York.
Solo and chamber music recitals have taken Mr. Kradjian from such Canadian cities as Toronto (Roy Thomson Hall and Toronto Centre for the Arts), Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver (Orpheum Theatre), and Edmonton (Winspear Centre), via the U.S - New York (Carnegie Hall), Atlanta (Spivey Hall), Miami, Chicago (Cultural Center) and Los Angeles - to European concert halls in Paris, Düsseldorf, Hanover, Munich, Salzburg, Lausanne, Geneva, Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao. He has played as far north as Norway's Trondheim and Bergen Festival, and as far east as Nicosia, Cyprus and Tokyo, Japan.
His concerts have been broadcast by the CBC, Radio de la Suisse Romande, Radio and TV España, the BBC, the Süddeutsche Rundfunk and NHK Japan.
Serouj Kradjian's solo discography includes the highly acclaimed traversals of Franz Liszt's Transcendental Etudes, released by Warner Music Spain and Liszt's Piano Concertos.His second solo disc entitled "Hommage à Paganini" with works by Brahms, Schumann, Chopin,Liszt and Rachmaninoff will be released in 2007. "Miniatures," an anthology of music written by Armenian composers, and Robert Schumann's three Sonatas for Violin and Piano (with Ara Malikian) are both Hänssler Classic releases. In 2002, he began working with soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, accompanying her in recitals in Canada and the United States. Their disc of songs by Pauline Viardot-Garcia was released in 2005 on the Analekta label, bringing the two artists, who are a married couple, international accolades and a 2006 Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year.
Works composed or arranged by Serouj Kradjian have been performed by such orchestras as I Musici Montreal and the Vancouver Symphony. He has especially enjoyed exploring and performing tangos by Astor Piazzolla, and his orchestral arrangements of folk songs by Gomidas - Armenia's national composer - were recently recorded and will be released in 2007 on Nonesuch Records. Kradjian was also founder and music director of Camerata Creativa in Madrid, Spain, a chamber orchestra dedicated to the performance of contemporary works.
Serouj Kradjian began his studies at the age of five, and by seven had won a National Competition for Young Musicians. At fourteen he earned a scholarship to study in Vienna, and later studied with Marietta Orlov at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music, where he earned a B.A. in Piano Performance in 1994. He studied with Einar Steen-Nökleberg at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hanover, receiving the coveted Solo Performance degree in 2001.
Mr. Kradjian's talent has been acknowledged by the Chalmers Grant of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council.
Serouj Kradjian is an exclusive recording artist of Warner Music Spain.
