Cultural Arts Performance – 39th Season

Join us for the 39th Season of AA’s Cultural Arts Performance Series featuring Israeli Pianist, Einav Yarden!

Featured Compositions:

• Schumann – Three Fantasy Pieces, op. 111
• Haydn – Piano Sonata no. 44 in F major, Hob. XVI/29; “Adagio” from Symphony #93 in D major; “Allegretto” from String Quartet op. 33 #5 in G major
• Bartok – Three Burlesques, op. 8c Schumann – Fantasy in C major, op. 17

Reception following concert. Free and open to the public. Donations to the Cultural Arts Fund are greatly appreciated.

About Einav Yarden:

Pianist Einav Yarden is praised for her “…imagination and exceptionally vivid playing… Sense of immense majesty, tempered by gentleness and quiet grace” (The Washington Post, USA), and “glistening rapture…ingenious humor” (Tagesspiegel, Germany). She has appeared as a soloist with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Radio Symphony Orchestra of Berlin and the Rundfunkchor Berlin, Minnesota Symphony, Calgary Philharmonic, Beethoven Orchester Bonn, Bucharest Philharmonic, Jerusalem Symphony, Plovdiv Philharmonic, the Israel Symphony Rishon Le-Zion among others, under conductors as Sir Neville Marriner, Aldo Ceccato, Leon Botstein, Stefan Blunier, Horia Andreescu, Mark Russell Smith, Simon Halsey, Mendi Rodan and others.

In May 2018 she released her third CD for Challenge Classics, with solo piano works by Robert Schumann. The CD received wide international acclaim. Her 2016 CD release of Haydn sonatas, also on Challenge Classics, was awarded the quarterly German Record Critics’ Award (Preis der deutsche Schallplattenkritik), selected as CD-of-the-Month on the ‘Piano News’ magazine and received enthusiastic press internationally. Her first CD for Challenge, called “Oscillations”, was released in 2013 and received much international acclaim. The CD combines works by Beethoven and Stravinsky.

Noteworthy stages she performed on include the Berlin Philharmonie and the Berlin Philharmonie Chamber Music Hall, the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, Berlin Konzerthaus, the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, Rose Theater at Lincoln Center, the Schumannsaal in Düsseldorf, and in Paris’s Salle Cortot, the Musée d’Orsay Auditorium, the Grand Salon of the Hotel des Invalides and others. Important festival participations include the Ruhr Piano Festival (Germany), Ravinia Festival (USA), The Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival (Israel), La Roque d’Anthéron International Piano Festival, Menton Festival and Flâneries Musicales de Reims Festival (France), Verbier Festival (Switzerland), Upper-Galilee Chamber Music Festival (Israel) and others. As part of the Lucern Festival in 2008, she was invited by Sir András Schiff to take part in a workshop on the five Beethoven concerti.

Among her competition prizes is the Third Prize at the 2009 International Beethoven Piano Competition in Bonn, prizes at the 2006 Minnesota International Piano-e-Competition and Esther Honens International Competition, and the First Prize at the 2001 Aviv Competitions in Israel, where she was awarded the Guralnik Piano Prize as well as the Zilbermann Prize for best performance of a contemporary Israeli work. She was a recipient of the AICF scholarships, an important scholarship institution in Israel, between 1996-2005.

A passionate chamber musician, and devotes herself regularly to collaborations with other musicians and she enthusiastically incorporates non-standard repertoire into her programs. In spring semester of 2016 she joined the adjunct faculty at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, teaching chamber music. Between summers 2012-2017 she was a Collaborative Pianist at Ravinia Festival’s Steans Music Institute in the USA.

Her performances have been broadcast, among others, on BBC (England), Deutsches Welle, WDR, and Deutschlandradio Kultur (Germany), France Musique (France), WQXR (New York), WFMT (Chicago), MPR (Minnesota), WBJC (Baltimore), WPR (Wisconsin), CBC (Canada), NPO Radio 4 (Netherlands) and Israel’s Kol Hamusica.

In 2005 she completed four years of study with the renowned pianist Leon Fleisher at the Peabody Conservatory (Johns Hopkins University), earning a Master of Music with high honors and a Graduate Performance Diploma. Prior to that she received a Bachelor of Music with high honors from the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music at the Tel Aviv University under the instruction of Prof. Emanuel Krasovsky, and her early education was with Hadassa Gonen at the Israel Conservatory Tel Aviv. Other piano guidance includes that of Elisso Virsaladze, Richard Goode and Prof. Zvi Meniker (on historical fortepianos). She is based in Berlin, Germany.