Ana-Marija Markovina
Pianist
Acclaim
“...sometimes it is hard to believe that only one pianist is playing […] This is an incredible piece and really demands to be heard, especially with a pianist as talented as this. Wow!”
“Needless to say, Markovina’s comprehensive and caring advocacy for this capricious, inventive and endlessly fascinating keyboard music adds up to a major catalog contribution and a reference C.P.E. Bach cycle that is not likely to be surpassed for years to come.”
Paul Badura-Skoda has described her as one of the most outstanding artists of her generation. Leading critics agree that her recording of the complete works of C.P.E. Bach will go down in the history of music; broadcasters in Europe, North and South America and Asia have disseminated her concerts, and her books enjoy a huge readership. We are talking about Ana-Marija Markovina. The pianist and author studied in Vienna and Weimar, attained her concert diploma in Berlin at the Hochschule für Musik, and achieved her doctorate in musicology at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg. She has played with numerous German and international orchestras. Markovina’s extensive soloistic concert work regularly takes her to all the most important German and international stages, such as the Philharmonie and Konzerthaus in Berlin, the Laeiszhalle Hamburg, Beethovenhalle Bonn, Munich’s Prinzregententheater and Herkulessaal, Liederhalle Stuttgart, Meistersingerhalle Nürnberg, Glocke in Bremen, Musikverein in Vienna, Parco della Musica in Rome, Auditorium di Milano, St. John’s Smith Square London and many more. She has guested at many festivals too, including the Bachwoche in Ansbach, Hamburg’s Bachfest, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Klavier-Festival Ruhr, Hohenloher Musiksommer, Beethovenfest Bonn, the Music Festival in Frankfurt an der Oder, the Brandenburg Summer Concerts, the European Week Festival in Passau, La Semaine Sainte en Arles and the International Piano Stars Festival in Latvia. She made her Japan debut during the International Piano Festival in Yokohama, which led to invitations to perform at all the country’s leading music venues.
Her discography includes world premiere recordings of the works of Hugo Wolf, Luise Adolpha Le Beau and Humperdinck’s arrangement of Wagner. To commemorate the 300th birthday of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in 2014 she released a CD box set with his entire keyboard works, which earned her the German Music Critics’ Prize, the Choc de Classica and a Grammy nomination. She has a close artistic relationship with the composer Stefan Heucke, whose Variations with Haydn op. 85 she premiered in 2017 beneath the cupola of the Reichstag (government) building in Berlin. Markovina’s selection of Heucke’s piano works is available as a CD box set on the Hänssler Classic label. In 2018 she released the entire solo works for piano by Anton Bruckner, and 2019 saw the release of her CD featuring the piano concertos by Edvard Grieg and Franz Berwald with the Landesorchester Schleswig-Holstein. That was followed in November 2019 by her first book entitled “Glücks-Spiel” published by Staccato Verlag. Her second book, “Klavier-Spiel. Künstlerische Identität, Karriere und Lebensglück” about gifted children and their career paths was published under the same imprint. Her third book, “Heim-Spiel” is an intensive study of people whose part-time passion is playing the piano.
In 2021 she initiated the Kölner Klavierzimmer competition – an international competition for amateurs. Nurturing amateur musicians is the focus of Markovina’s teaching work. Ana-Marija Markovina’s recording of the entire solo piano works of Felix Mendelssohn was released at the beginning of 2022 on the Hänssler Classic label and earned the highest praise with consumers and music critics. Her study of those works provided the impetus for her to devote her next release to the entire works for piano by Felix’s sister Fanny.
