Many are not aware that Utah is home to one of the largest and most prominent international piano competitions in the world. The Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition has attracted immense talent from across the world, including one young Armenian pianist Karén Hakobyan. In 2001 he came to Utah to compete at the tender age of 16. While he was here he was “discovered” by the piano faculty at the University of Utah and was invited to study both piano and composition.
I asked him if he had been interested in composition before he came to Utah.
“Oh definitely. Since I was about five or six years old I took composition lessons and I was very fortunate to have a great teacher in Armenia as well," Hakobyan said. "I wrote my first symphony when I was 11, so its been a very big part of my life and I take composition as seriously as piano. I really feel that they complement one another.”
When I spoke with him, he had arrived just hours earlier from New York City, where he currently lives. We chatted in the sleek, air-conditioned lobby of the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, which hosts the Gina Bachauer competition. He told me that he was looking forward to celebrating his 30th birthday in Salt Lake City and to connect with old friends which, 14 years later, still includes his former host family.
This year he’s been invited back the Gina Bachauer to give a solo recital and masterclass as part of their festival series.
“I’ve used Utah as my home state. I always feel at home here. The University of Utah, it played an instrumental role in my shaping as a musician and my development. So it’s always a pleasure coming back here and I feel like I’m coming back home and I like to be [here] as often as possible,” Hakobyan said.
Like curating an exhibition at an art museum, programming what pieces appear on a recital is just as important as how one arranges them together. Performers spend a lot of time deciding what story they are going to communicate to their audience.
In the first half of the program, Hakobyan has placed together the seemingly unlikely pair of French and Armenian composers.
“As I’ve been searching the music of all these composers, I’ve been finding some very interesting connections among them,” Hakobyan said.
One of these Armenian composers, Komitas, was an ethnomusicologist who toured Europe with his choir. Debussy, a Frenchman who was known for his keen interest in different and exotic sounds, openly called Komitas a “genius.”
“I placed them all in the first half and I also placed two of my own concert etudes that I feel had been inspired by some of those composers in the program of the music so that’s why the first half is focusing on that,” Hakobyan said.
The second half is made up of transcriptions, which are when a composer takes a piece from another composer and reworks it into their own style and instrumentation. He said that there will also be a definite element of spontaneity and jazz. Exactly what he means by that will be revealed during the concert itself.
“The whole program has a little bit of a folk element to it because they all have very unique melodies, all the pieces I have chosen. They represent different countries, for example, Gershwin represents American music, Debussy the French, and Khatchiturian the Armenian…," Hakobyan said.
Hakobyan has curated a diverse recital program of international composers, perhaps reflecting his own experiences touring as a concert pianist across the globe these past 14 years. In an exhibition of sorts, he comes full circle and shares these experiences with us here in Utah, where it all began.
More information regarding Karén Hakobyan's performance Wednesday can be found on the Gina Bachauer website.