Russia's Sofya Gulyak - NZ International Piano Festival

Sensational Russian pianist Sofya Gulyak will perform at the New Zealand International Piano Festival.

The New Zealand International Piano Festival (NZIPF) features seven of the world’s top pianists performing five recitals at the Concert Chamber, Auckland Town Hall, THE EDGE from 21-26 April. The festival celebrates the rich textures of the piano from steamy intensity to dreamy introspection.

Sofya Gulyak is the only woman to win the prestigious Leeds Piano Competition and since taking first prize in 2009 she has appeared all over the world to great acclaim, playing with leading orchestras and at major music festivals including the Liszt Festival at the Villa d’Este, and the Chopin festival in Duzniki-Zdroj.

For the NZIPF recital, Sofya will perform an all-Russian programme; composers with whom she has a natural and a native affinity.

The first half is all Rachmaninov featuring four of the composer’s shorter pieces, the mega-famous Prelude in C-sharp minor and Rachmaninov’s last solo piano piece, the Corelli Variations; not so well known perhaps as his Paganini Variations, but warm, showy, and at the time, very modern.

This concert’s second half will open with two Scriabin ‘Poems’ in the manner of Chopin, followed by a Prelude and Fugue by Shostakovich. The climax to the programme will be one of Prokofiev’s ‘War Sonatas’, Number six, composed off and on during the whole six-year period of WWII, and full of a wide range of conflicting moods including sadness, mockery, drama, and violence.

Also featuring in the New Zealand International Piano Festival are New Zealand pianists Richard Mapp and Emma Sayers; Russian-Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg; Chinese-born pianist Jian Liu; and Oleg Stepanov (Latvia) and Natasha Vlassenko (Russia).

As a special feature of this year’s festival, three pianists will perform concerts in Wellington and Invercargill.

The New Zealand International Piano Festival was created in 2005 by internationally acclaimed concert pianist and Steinway artist Tamas Vesmas. His vision was to present a Piano Festival that would expose audiences to some of the world’s top concert pianists. As well as the concert series, the artists also perform special dinner concerts at Mollies, and conduct masterclasses for young New Zealand pianists.

The New Zealand International Piano Festival is proudly brought to you by Lewis Eady Ltd and the Lewis Eady Charitable Trust.