Piano Recital with Ivana Gavrić (GB)

About the event

With her debut album “In the Mists”, British pianist Ivana Gavrić created a sensation. For her “outstanding achievement” she was named BBC Music Magazine Newcomer of the Year 2011. “Her playing has clarity, refinement and a beautifully fluent phrasing … here are sharp intelligence and impressive technique at work” (The Times). Her third CD, from 2013, featuring works by Grieg, was named Editor's Choice in Gramophone, described as “an electrifying performance”. The Grieg Society named the CD “Recording of the Year”.

Ivana Gavrić's concert programme for Darmstadt takes her listeners on a musical journey that begins in Paris, travels via Poland to Norway, and includes Switzerland, Italy and Spain as further stops along the way. The first part of the programme is devoted to Chopin's early mazurkas, which also form the focus of her new CD, released in April by Edition Classics. From her previous CD, devoted to Edvard Grieg's piano works, she will then perform the Ballade, his most important composition for solo piano, along with some of his popular “Lyric Pieces” and his arrangements of Norwegian folk songs published under the title “Slåtter”. After the interval, Ivana Gavrić turns finally to Franz Liszt, Chopin's friend and, in his later years, mentor to the young Grieg, whose musical settings of Petrarch's love sonnets she will perform, concluding with the effectively flamboyant Rhapsodie espagnole.

“Gavrić's recording of Liszt's Petrarch Sonnets is also fresh and imaginative; the singing melodic line is supported by a warm and nuanced accompaniment.” (BBC Music Magazine, December 2010)

Ivana Gavrić comes from a musical family and received her first piano lessons from her mother in Sarajevo. After the family moved, she continued her studies in Great Britain at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama Junior Department. She then studied music at Cambridge University and piano at the Royal College of Music. Further training followed with Menahem Pressler, Ferenc Rados, Dmitry Bashkirov, Boris Berman, Stephen Kovacevich and Leif Ove Andsnes. Ivana Gavrić is an ambassador for the charity “Musicians Action International” and now lives in Zurich.