London Times“Technical brilliance and imaginative delight…”
L'Actualité“Babayan favors a playing style that speaks to the senses, to the range of his love for the music, which is unsurpassed. An enthusiastic multi-instrumentalist, tirelessly studying the works of his predecessors as if they were his contemporaries, he does not hide himself from this nearly obsessive research of a spiritual music, which comes close to magic.”
The Independent“Babayan exuded the gravity of a monumental sculpture in bronze, as he teased out the beauties of this more ruminative work.”
Limelight“…if your expectation is that this will be pretty special, you are right. This recording is the culmination of a series of live performances Babayan and Argerich have given over the last few years, starting at the Lugano Festival in 2013, and the sense of a rock-solid musical partnership is palpable…The emotional climax is, not surprisingly, the lovers’ farewell, which, in this performance, is intensely moving but also icily brilliant, particularly in the final pages.”
The New York Times“Sergei Babayan brought consummate technique and insight to the cryptic Fifth Concerto, another work in which Prokofiev’s Neo-Classical approach is rendered Modernist, even baffling, through fragmentation and harmonic strangeness. The intrepid audience awarded hearty ovations to every pianist. Hopefully it won’t take another marathon to hear the overlooked, underrated concertos.”
ColinsColumn.com“Sergei Babayan has already given us one of the indispensable Rachmaninov recordings, and he consolidated his prowess in this composer’s output with a reading of the D-minor Third Piano Concerto that enjoyed fleet fingers, Romantic yearning, crunchy chords and persuasive fluctuations of tempo and dynamics – lived in, breathed, aflame with identification – Babayan communing with the music, choosing the more-technically-demanding of the two first-movement cadenzas, heroically dispatched, and in its wake strumming lyrical asides to melt the hardest of hearts.”
Sergei Babayan has long been venerated as a “pianist’s pianist” whose interpretations combine “quiet beauty and emotional fire” (The Times of London). Celebrated for his solo recitals, chamber concerts, and concerto collaborations with orchestras around the globe, the Armenian American pianist is also one of today’s preeminent pedagogues and an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist with a growing and distinguished discography. Bachtrack calls him “one of the greatest pianists of our time.” “This is piano playing of the very highest echelon,” agrees MusicWeb International. As Canada’s Le Devoir concludes, “Babayan is a genius. Period.”
This season, Babayan performs Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto with Naples’s Orchestra del Teatro di San Carlo and the same composer’s Third with orchestras including Belgium’s Antwerp Symphony, led by its Chief Conductor, Elim Chan; Maryland’s National Philharmonic at Strathmore; and France’s Orchestre symphonique de l’Opéra de Toulon and Orchestre symphonique de Tours. Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto is similarly prominent in Babayan’s 2024-25 programming, taking him to Poland for performances with the Baltic Philharmonic, Arthur Rubinstein Philharmonic, and NFM Wrocław Philharmonic, with which he reprises the work in Dresden. Other upcoming orchestral collaborations include Ravel concertos with Italy’s Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano, to celebrate the French composer’s 150th anniversary; Mozart’s “Jeunehomme” with Lithuania’s Kremerata Baltica, both at the ensemble’s Vilnius home and on a tour of Italy; and a concerto for two pianos at Switzerland’s Verbier Festival, where Babayan will be joined by his former student and frequent piano partner Daniil Trifonov with the Verbier Festival Orchestra under the baton of Christoph Eschenbach.
Also in the 2024-25 season, Babayan debuts “Songs,” an imaginatively curated solo recital program exploring the evolution of lieder, folksong, and the art of melody. Combining solo pieces with piano transcriptions of songs by composers from Schubert, Schumann, and Rachmaninoff to Harold Arlen, Charles Trenet, and Armenian folk hero Komitas, this takes him from New Orleans to the Verbier Festival by way of London, Freiburg, Madrid, Málaga, and multiple locations in Italy. He performs Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the Konzerthaus Dortmund; joins violinist Mihaela Martin and cellist Truls Mørk for piano trios at Germany’s Kronberg Academy; and partners with violinist Emmanuel Tjeknavorian for sonatas by Mozart, Prokofiev, and Janàček at Italy’s Auditorium di Milano.
Acclaimed in concert for his “consummate technique and insight” (New York Times), Babayan has worked with such revered conductors as Thomas Dausgaard, Valery Gergiev, Neeme Järvi, Sir Antonio Pappano, Rafael Payare, David Robertson, Dima Slobodeniouk, Tugan Sokhiev, Gábor Takács-Nagy, Yuri Temirkanov, Xian Zhang, and Nikolaj Znaider, collaborating with some of the foremost orchestras worldwide. These include the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Czech State Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Mariinsky Orchestra, National Orchestra of Belgium, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Orchestre national de Lille, Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Royal Bangkok Symphony, São Paulo Symphony, Toronto Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, Warsaw Philharmonic, and London Symphony Orchestra, with which he has appeared at the BBC Proms.
Babayan has undertaken artistic residencies with the Rotterdam Philharmonic and at the Konzerthaus Dortmund, where, as Curating Artist in 2019, he presented a festival featuring some of his closest musical associates: Martha Argerich, Sergey Khachatryan, Mischa Maisky, and Daniil Trifonov among them. He regularly performs at many of the world’s most prestigious venues, including New York’s Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and Brooklyn Academy of Music; London’s Barbican, Royal Albert, and Wigmore Halls; and the Théâtre des Champs-Elyseés and Maison de la Radio in Paris, as well as Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the Berlin Konzerthaus, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, Munich’s Prinzregententheater, Dortmund’s Konzerthaus, Alte Oper Frankfurt, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Zurich Tonhalle, and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Sought after by summer festivals on both sides of the Atlantic, he appears at the United States’ Aspen Music Festival, Bravo! Vail, and International Keyboard Odyssiad & Festival; Canada’s Vancouver Piano Sessions; London’s BBC Proms; France’s Piano aux Jacobins and Festival International de Piano de la Roque d’Anthéron; Switzerland’s Gstaad Menuhin and Verbier Festivals; and Austria’s Salzburg Festival. His chamber music partners include the Borodin Quartet, violinist Ivry Gitlis, and fellow pianists Argerich and Trifonov. “The firepower they achieved together is rare among piano duos,” writes the New York Times of his Trifonov partnership, while The Guardian considers his Argerich collaborations “sheer delight.”
As an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist since 2018, Babayan has made three recordings for the label. Recorded with Argerich, Prokofiev for Two (2018) captures his own two-piano transcriptions, prompting MusicWeb International to marvel: “World-class playing by both performers and the Babayan transcriptions are destined to be taken up by other pianists and incorporated into the mainstream repertoire.” His solo collection, Rachmaninoff (2020), was chosen as BBC Music magazine’s “Recording of the Month” and designated a “Choc-Classica” by France’s Classica magazine, which pronounced the album “one big masterpiece.” Most recently, Rachmaninoff for Two (2024) was recorded with Trifonov to mark the composer’s 150th anniversary. Naming it among the “Best Classical Music Albums of 2024 (So Far),” BBC Music hailed the collection as “a winning mix of limitless pianism, deep knowledge and visionary boldness.” Earlier in his career, Babayan recorded for Connoisseur Society, Discover Records, and Pro Piano Records, for which his 20th-century collection of Messiaen, Respighi, Ligeti, and Carl Vine was a New York Times Critic’s Choice. As well as streaming to audiences worldwide on Medici TV, his performances have been broadcast by Britain’s BBC TV and BBC Radio 3, Radio France, and Japan’s NHK Satellite Television.
One of today’s most distinguished piano teachers, Babayan counts Ching-Yun Hu, Stanislav Khristenko, and Daniil Trifonov among his former students. Having previously taught for many years at the Cleveland Institute of Music, he now serves on the piano faculties of New York’s Juilliard School and Dallas’s SMU Meadows School of the Arts, where he is the Joel Estes Tate Endowed Chair in Piano and Artist in Residence.
Sergei Babayan was born into a musical family in Armenia during the Soviet occupation. After receiving his first piano lessons from Luiza Markaryan and Georgy Saradjev, a leading representative of the St. Petersburg school and former student of the legendary Vladimir Sofronitsky, he went on to study at the Moscow Conservatory with Lev Naumov, Vera Gornostayeva, and Mikhail Pletnev. In 1989, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Babayan came to the United States, drawing international notice with first-prize wins at the Cleveland, Robert Casadesus, Palm Beach, Hamamatsu, and Scottish International Piano Competitions. Now an American citizen, he makes his home in New York City.
2024-2025
12.18.20
