Chamber music concert with Tanja Becker-Bender and Sofya Melikyan

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 Musikhochschule Stuttgart, 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. She received further inspiration there from the Bartók pupil 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. Another professorship in Hamburg in 2009. 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 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 completed her further 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 is 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. As a prizewinner of numerous international piano competitions, her performances have been broadcast on television stations (including Deutschlandfunk and WDR 3).