Tanja Becker-Bender received her musical training from some of the leading quartet musicians of our time: After her junior studies with Wilhelm Melcher (Melos Quartet) at the Stuttgart University of Music, she studied with Günter Pichler (Alban Berg Quartet) at the University of Music in Vienna. She then completed her Artist Diploma with Robert Mann (Juilliard String Quartet) at the Juilliard School in New York. There she received further inspiration from the Bartók student György Sándor as well as from Eberhard Feltz in Berlin and Ferenc Rados in Budapest. She received numerous awards at international competitions early on. In 2006, she succeeded Maxim Vengerov as professor in Saarbrücken. In 2009 another professorship in Hamburg. Becker-Bender dedicates herself to a wide range of violin repertoire, from baroque violin to collaborations with contemporary composers such as Cristóbal Halffter and Peter Ruzicka and to world premieres of works by Rolf Hempel, Benedict Mason and Alexander Goehr. Sofya Melikyan was born in Armenia and began her pianistic training at the Tchaikovsky School in Yerevan with Anahit Shajbazyan. She continued her training at the Royal Conservatory in Madrid with Joaquin Soriano, at the École Normale de Musique Alfred Cortot in Paris with Ramzi Yassa and at the Manhattan School of Music in New York with Solomon Mikowsky. She has been praised as “a highly sensitive interpreter who always subordinates technical aspects to rhetoric” (Remy Franck, Pizzicato) and “a musician with a strong, self-confident voice” (Klassik Heute). She regularly performs worldwide as a soloist and with orchestras. A winner of numerous international piano competitions, her performances have been broadcast on television stations (including Deutschlandfunk and WDR 3).
