Turkish pianist and orchestra to open Austrian Festival

Turkish pianist and orchestra to open Austrian Festival

Pianist and composer Fazil Say and philharmonic orchestra will give the opening concert of an Austrian festival on Sunday.
Turkish pianist and composer Fazil Say and Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra will take stage on the first day of the Festival of Salzburg, a Medieval city of 150,000 population where Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born. Celebrating its 90th anniversary this year, the festival will end on August 30.

Fazil Say, born in 1970, is just as much a composer as he is a pianist. At the age of seventeen he was awarded a scholarship that enabled him to study for five years with David Levine at the Robert Schumann Institute in Dusseldorf. He wrote the work Black Hymns at the age of sixteen. In 1991 he premiered his Concerto for Piano and Violin with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, and in 1996 his second piano concerto Silk Road was given its first performance in Boston. From 1992 to 1995 he continued his studies at the Berlin Conservatory. In 1994 he was the winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, which gave a rapid start to his international career.
His oratorio Nazim, based on poems by the famous Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and commissioned by the Turkish Ministry of Culture, was premiered in Ankara in 2001. He has composed highly virtuosic adaptations for piano and orchestra of such works as Mozart's Rondo alla turca and Paganini Jazz.
Say is a regular guest with the New York Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic, the Baltimore Symphony, the St Petersburg Philharmonic, the BBC Philharmonic, the Orchestre National de France and other leading orchestras across the globe.