Ivari Ilja

Tallinn born Ivari Ilja studied the piano at the Tallinn State Conservatoire with Professor Laine Mets and at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire with Professor Vera Gornostayeva and Professor Sergey Dorensky.

He has won prices in several national and international competitions, including the Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw and the Vianna da Motta Piano Competition in Lisbon.

Ivari has given recitals and performed as a soloist with orchestras including the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and the St.Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, with conductors such as Arvo Volmer, Eri Klas, Leo Krämer, Veronica Dudarova, Urs Schneider, Roman Matsov, Imants Resnis, Andres Mustonen, Peeter Lilje, Theodore Kuchar and Vello Pähn .

His repertoire mostly includes Romantic music, such as Chopin, Brahms, and Schumann, but he also performs repertoire by composers such as Mozart, Prokofiev and Britten.

Ivari Ilja also performs in chamber music, and has accompanied amongst others Irina Arkhipova, Maria Guleghina, Elena Zaremba, Pauletta de Vaughn, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky.

Recent engagements include venues like San Francisco Symphony, LA Music Center Opera, Washington Performing Arts society, Helsinki Festival, Teatro di San Carlo, Carnegie hall, Musikverein Vienna, Van Cliburn Foundation, Dresden Semperoper, Bank of America Celebrity Series, Gulbenkian Foundation, Kimmel Center, Monnaie, Athens Concert Hall, Reykjavik Arts Festival and the Russian Show Centre.

Future engagements will include a Delos recording with Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the Singapore concerts of IMG and St Olav’s Festival in Norway.