PIANO RECITAL 

The Pharos Arts Foundation opens its 2015 season with a piano recital by the extremely talented Anahit Chaushyan. Born into a family of professional musicians, Anahit started her musical training at the age of six and subsequently studied in Brussels, London and Italy. She has gained international reputation for her appearances with the Fugata Quintet, of which she is the founder, and appeared as a solo! ist in concerts all over the world. For her first ever recital in Cyprus, Anahit will perform Prokofiev’s colossal Piano Sonata No.6 – the first of Prokofiev’s three ‘War Sonatas’, generally considered the pinnacle of his piano music, Brahms’ Intermezzi from Klavierstücke Op.118, and Schumann’s Kreisleriana. 

ANAHIT CHAUSHYAN / PIANO 
Anahit Chaushyan was born into the fourth generation in a family of professional musicians and she started her musical training at the age of six. After completing her studies in Armenia she had given numerous recitals and many of her early performances included premieres by contemporary Armenian composers. Anahit continued her studies in Belgium and the UK and subsequently graduated from the Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles where she studied under Evgeni Mogilevski and from Royal Academy of Music (Dip RAM) in London where she studied under Pascal Nemirovski. She is a recipient! of the Diploma D’Onore at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. She is a laureate of the International Emmanuel Durlet Piano Competition in Antwerp, Belgium. Her studies were complemented by master classes from the likes of Paul Badura-Skoda, Michele Campanella, Lazar Berman, Lev Naumov and Stephen Hough.

Anahit Chaushyan has appeared as a soloist all over the world, in venues such as the Wigmore Hall, the Royal Festival Hall and the St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London, the Santori Hall in Tokyo, the Grande Salle du Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles and the Gavot Hall in Paris. She has made numerous concert appearances with the London Soloists Orchestra and has regular performance engagements with the Armenian State Philharmonic Orchestra. She is a member of the Orpheus & Bacchus Ensemble (France), the Amaranth Trio, and she is the founder of Fugata Quintet (UK). She has also adjudicated at various international piano competitions.

THE PROGRAMME: 
Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No.6 is known for its passages of electric fury alternating with flowing lyricism. It was completed in February 1940, and together with his piano sonatas Nos. 7 and 8, it would comprise the composer’s so-called War Sonatas. The Sonata No.6 was premiered in April 1940 on a Moscow radio broadcast featuring Prokofiev himself. It was not performed onstage before an audience until the autumn, when the young Sviatoslav Richter played it for his official debut concert. Written four years before the composer’s death, Brahms’s Klavierstücke, Op.118 consists of six individual movements composed separately, though for the sake of convenience they were published together in 1893 under a single opus number. Having given the work a broadly generic title, the composer granted himself enough freedom of expression by crafting a set of miniature masterpieces which can be played as a whole or independently. Schumann’s Kreisleriana pays t! ribute to the novelist ETA Hoffmann and his most famous literary creation, Kapellmeister Kreisler – a musician in perpetual emotional turmoil, with an artistic soul that could never make peace with the Philistine society he had to serve. The eight short movements that constitute Kreisleriana express a dazzling variety of moods. Passionate, dreamy and impulsive; there are moments of great drama and moments of devout serenity.