Search - Johannes Brahms, Anna Gourari :: Brahms: The Late Piano Pieces, Opp. 116-119

Anna Gourari began receiving piano instruction at the age of five at the Special Music School for highly talented children in her native city of Kazan in Russia. Master classes with Professor Vera Gornostaeva at the Moscow Conservatory stand out among her early musical experiences; then, in 1990, she moved to Germany and continued her piano studies with Professor Ludwig Hoffmann in Munich. In her approach to the piano, the Russian artist unites the influences of two eminent European piano traditions: analytic stringency combines with the emotionality of her Russian heritage. In 1986 she won first prize at the Kabalevsky Competition; four years later she won first prize at the International Chopin Competition in Göttingen. At the first International Clara Schumann Piano Competition in Düsseldorf in 1994, a prestigious panel of adjudicators made up of Joachim Kaiser, Martha Argerich, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Nelson Freire, and Alexis Weissenberg awarded her first prize and praised her "almost mystical piano playing." Since then, Gourari has built up an excellent reputation as soloist and chamber musician in the most important centers of music. Her highly acclaimed recordings--several featured for months in the German classical charts--have made her the Deutsche Phonoakademie "Up-and-coming Female Musician of the Year," and she has twice been named the ECHO Klassik "Instrumentalist of the Year."