Anna Han
Pianist, Artists in Residence Concert - July 8
American pianist ANNA HAN spends most of her time digging for clues about the human condition. Her performances attempt to help audiences experience a huge variety of classical piano repertoire as though they were being written in real time. She is eternally grateful for the colorful community of people that the search for musical truth has led her to, the privilege to operate in an idealistic space, and the well of beauty that she could not possibly drain in one lifetime, from which she pours to compliant drinkers anywhere she can find them.
Anna is a laureate of many national and international competitions, including the Naumburg International Piano Competition, Hilton Head International Piano Competition, Juilliard Bachauer Competition, New York International Piano Competition, United States National Federation of Music Clubs, the Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad’s Andre Hoffman Prize, and Music Academy of the West Concerto Competition. A passionate advocate for the traditional masterpieces that have enchanted audiences for centuries, she has also explored new avenues of musical expression with an array of collaborators. Her repertoire includes more than thirty compositions by living composers, including multiple premiers; nineteen concerti; and over a hundred complete works for strings and piano. She has had the terrific honor of performing with Alexi Kenney, Itzhak Perlman, John Myerscough, Kim Kashkashian, Steven Isserlis, the Verona Quartet, and many others. She has given concerts at the Alice Tully Hall, BOZAR Brussels, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, National Concert Hall of Taipei, National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying), Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, St. John’s Smith Square in London, to name a few.
Anna is currently one of four pianists in the Sir András Schiff Performance Programme for Young Pianists at the Kronberg Academy in Germany. Her studies are generously funded by the Henle patronage of the Günter Henle Stiftung. She is also the Education Director at the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, an institution dedicated towards nurturing emerging young artists of the highest caliber from all around the world. She has conducted masterclasses, lectures, workshops, and outreach concerts for a large variety of audiences, and guides a small studio of dedicated students, including several adult amateurs. She recently served on the faculty of Yellow Barn’s Young Artist Program, where she coached pre-college and college students much more talented than she was at their age. With the help of the 2021 Bita Cattelan Philanthropic Engagement Award from the Concours Musical International de Montréal, she is filming and producing a documentary about the effect that Covid had on a handful of young classical musicians who performed in the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance in 2020 and now live all around the world.
Born in Mesa, Arizona, Anna’s musical journey began when she picked out the Olympic theme song on a small electric keyboard, and her parents enrolled her in music lessons at East Valley Yamaha Music School for classes in improvisation, ear training, composition, and other general musical skills. She also studied privately with Mr. Fei Xu, who for thirteen years trained and inspired her to rapidly and thoughtfully learn demanding repertoire, developing a technique that undergirded her growing career at a young age. At age 11, she became the national first place winner of the Music Teachers National Association Competition, having barely made the age cutoff, and made her orchestra debut with the Chandler Symphony Orchestra, playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1. After sweeping prizes at numerous international piano competitions, she was named a United States Presidential Scholar in the Arts in 2014.
She completed her Bachelor and Masters degrees at The Juilliard School under the tutelage of Robert McDonald, where she was a recipient of both the Kovner Fellowship and the William Schuman Prize for outstanding achievement and leadership in music. She then accidently spent six months during a Covid lockdown doing a residency at the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance in Nova Scotia, where she took advantage of the uniquely remote location to perform in fifteen different programs for a small, masked audience, including nearly five hours of Beethoven’s solo and chamber music to celebrate his 250th birthday. Her next chapter was in London, where she received a Professional Diploma at the Royal Academy of Music in London under the tutelage of Christopher Elton. She then moved to Berlin to complete an Artist Diploma at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin under the tutelage of Sir András Schiff and Schaghajegh Nostrati. Other significant influences on her thinking include her three summers each at Yellow Barn, Kneisel Hall Chamber Music School and Festival, and the Four Seasons Chamber Music Festival.
