The Turkish pianist and composer with a four-decade prolific career, Huseyin Sermet tonight will perform within the music programme of Ohrid Summer Festival. The concert will take place at St Sophia church in the standard festival timing, 9 p.m.
Sermet is noted for his wide-ranging musical interests and intensely personal vision, encompassing a large and eclectic repertoire and pianistic versatility.
Hüseyin Sermet was born in Istanbul in 1955 and began his education at the Ankara State Conservatoire. He continued his studies at the Paris Conservatoire and later at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris Alfred Cortot with Thierry de Brunhoff, Nadia Boulanger and Maria Curcio. He also studied composition with Olivier Messiaen and received the Lili Boulanger Award for his early string quartet. He has performed all over the world with conductors such as Vladimir Jurowski, Semyon Bychkov, David Robertson, Lawrence Foster, Pablo Heras-Casado, Jonathan Nott, James Gaffigan and Hans Graf, and instrumentalists Maria João Pires, Gautier and Renaud Capuçon. He has worked with orchestras including the London Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, Bamberger Symphoniker, and NHK, Shanghai, Tokyo and Detroit symphony orchestras, amongst many others.
Sermet has given solo recitals at major series and venues worldwide, including those in London, Munich, Lisbon, Copenhagen, the Oxford and Lille.
Equally active as a composer, Sermet’s first major composition Réminiscènce 1 was premiered at the Empéri Festival in 1997 and was followed by a commission from Tokyo Symphony Orchestra-Dream and Nightmare, was premiered in 2004.
Many of Hüseyin Sermet’s numerous recordings for Naïve, Harmonia mundi and Erato have won major international prizes, including his disc of Ravel’s solo piano works, three discs devoted to Alkan (all winning a Diapason d’Or de l’Année), a selection of Schubert’s works for four hands with Maria João Pires and a recording of Liszt’s Piano Sonata and late works.
