Biography
American pianist ANNA HAN spends her time digging for clues about the human condition. Led by a probing intellect and desire for emotional honesty, she presents a wide variety of repertoire with a distinctively courageous and poetic voice.
“Music, like no other medium, allows us to zoom into individual moments of living, of humanness. Each phrase can reveal the vulnerability of existence and a depth of interpersonal influences; it is a privilege and necessity to keep this dialogue alive.”
Han’s boundary-defying artistic output is the result of a wide variety of influences: she has studied in five countries and collaborates frequently with musicians of all generations. She is currently one of four students of Sir András Schiff at the Kronberg Academy in Germany, generously funded by the Günter Henle Stiftung. She also serves as the Education Director at the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance in Nova Scotia and as a faculty member at the Yellowbarn Young Artist Program in the US. Equally at home as a soloist and as a chamber musician, her repertoire includes more than twenty concerti, a hundred complete works for strings and piano, and thirty compositions by living composers. She frequently performs in Europe, North America, and Asia.
A laureate of the Naumburg International Piano Competition, the Hilton Head International Piano Competition, the New York International Piano Competition, the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, and many others, she has performed as a soloist with orchestras across the United States and England, recorded for the Steinway and Sons label, and collaborated with renowned artists including Itzhak Perlman,Kim Kashkashian, Steven Isserlis, John Myerscough, the Verona Quartet, among others. Recent debuts include Alte Oper Frankfurt, BOZAR Brussels, Charlottesville Symphony Orchestra, Filarmonica de Burgos, Filarmonica de Gijon, La Jolla Music Society Summerfest, Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, National Concert Hall of Taipei, Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, and Tippet Rise in Montana. As the winner of the United States National Federation of Music Clubs Competition, she performed a five-concert tour throughout Arkansas, incorporating a handful of works written by composers from Arkansas. She frequently curates concerts with mixed ensembles for a variety of non-traditional venues, performs her own transcriptions, and fuses time periods between her use of anything from electronics to the fortepiano, in an attempt to experience all music as though it was being created in the present.
Born in Arizona, Han began her musical journey with classes at the East Valley Yamaha Music School. She studied privately with Mr. Fei Xu for thirteen years and made her orchestra debut with the Chandler Symphony Orchestra at age 11, playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1. She later studied with Robert McDonald at The Juilliard School, where she was a teaching fellow, a recipient of both the Kovner Fellowship and the William Schuman Prize for outstanding achievement and leadership in music, and the winner of Juilliard’s Bachauer Competition. In 2020 she spent six months during a Covid lockdown doing a residency in Nova Scotia, where she took advantage of the uniquely remote location to perform fifteen different programs, including nearly five hours of Beethoven’s solo and chamber music for a small, masked audience. During her next chapter, she studied with Christopher Elton at the Royal Academy of Music in London, before moving to Berlin to complete her Artist Diploma at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin under Sir András Schiff and Schaghajegh Nostrati. Other significant influences include three summers each at Yellow Barn, Kneisel Hall Chamber Music School and Festival, and the Four Seasons Chamber Music Festival.
“The prodigiously gifted Anna Han…played with such incisive power and assurance that you felt you could follow her into battle… It may have been Han’s naturalism and grace at the piano, though, that impressed the most.” - The Washington Post