Sergei Babayan

Sergei Babayan himself has observed that making music should be open to surprises and spontaneous insights, allowing unexpected emotions to emerge and subtle shadings to evolve naturally. His thoughtful musicianship has grown over decades of painstaking musical explorations, and throughout his career, he has built a broad and deep repertoire encompassing well over sixty concertos and other works by composers from Bach, Beethoven, Ligeti and Lutosławski to Prokofiev, Pärt, Rameau and Ryabov. Born into a musical family in Armenia, Babayan received his first piano lessons at the age of six from Luiza Markaryan and was then taught by pianist Georgy Saradjev, a leading representative of the St Petersburg school and former student of the legendary Vladimir Sofronitsky. Babayan subsequently studied with Lev Naumov, Vera Gornostayeva and Mikhail Pletnev at the Moscow Conservatory. As the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s, he became the first artist from the USSR to attend international competitions without state sponsorship. He made his breakthrough in 1989 with a consecutive series of competition victories, generating news headlines and attracting interest from fellow artists by winning the Robert Casadesus International Piano Competition (since renamed the Cleveland International Piano Competition), the Hamamatsu International Piano Competition in Japan and the Scottish International Piano Competition. Following his move to the United States, he joined the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1992 as artist-in-residence. In high demand ever since, he has performed at such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Théâtre des Champs-Elyseés, Konzerthaus Berlin and Munich’s Prinzregententheater, appeared at the Salzburg, Verbier and La Roque d’Anthéron festivals and worked with many of the world’s leading conductors, among them Valery Gergiev, Neeme Järvi, Sir Antonio Pappano, Rafael Payare, David Robertson, Tugan Sokhiev, Gábor Takács-Nagy, Yuri Temirkanov, Joshua Weilerstein and Nikolaj Znaider. His career also includes performances with leading orchestras, such as the London Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre, Warsaw Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and New World Symphony. In 2019, Sergei Babayan was Curating Artist at Konzerthaus Dortmund, where he presented a festival of performances with his closest musical partners and friends, including Martha Argerich (with whom he recorded his first Deutsche Grammophon album, Prokofiev for Two), Daniil Trifonov, Mischa Maisky, Sergey Khachatryan, and Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra. Other highlights include debut performances with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester and the Toronto Symphony orchestra, piano duo concerts with Daniil Trifonov in the US, and recitals of works by J.S. Bach and Chopin. Babayan also teaches piano at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Julliard.