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Biography / Eve Egoyan

Eve Egoyan is a concert pianist who specializes in the performance of new works. Her intense focus, command of the instrument, insightful interpretations, and unique programmes welcome audiences into unknown territory, bridging the gap between them and contemporary composers. Composers have a uniformly high regard for her performances of their works, often considering them definitive.

She has included the works of Erik Satie in recital programmes from the beginning of her solo career, seeing in his work, as other musicians and composers have before her, precursors to many contemporary compositional ideas. Satie’s music, existing both temporally and aesthetically on the border between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, helps contextualize related work by younger composers or, in an all-Satie programme, provides a kind of “skeleton key” to contemporary work, as well as being a powerful aesthetic experience in its own right. “I originally decided to investigate Satie’s music more thoroughly as a millennium project for myself. I was curious about what composers were doing at the turn of their century. When I select composers of my own time, I look for composers who are true to themselves and are not of a particular school. I was intrigued by the individuality of Satie.” Her live performances of Satie are acclaimed as empathic interpretations of the work of another artist with a deeply personal vision.

Eve has performed the North American premières of works by international composers Maria de Alvear, Gavin Bryars, Alvin Curran, Michael Finnissy, Masahiro Miwa, Karen Tanaka, and Judith Weir, and many Canadian composers have written works for her, including John Abram, Martin Arnold, Allison Cameron, José Evangelista, Anthony Genge, Rudolf Komorous, Michael Longton, Juliet Palmer, Stephen Parkinson, James Rolfe, John Sherlock, Linda C. Smith, and Ann Southam. CBC Radio has recorded and broadcast most of these performances. Internationally, she has appeared as a solo recitalist in London, Paris, New York, and Cologne. Recently, she has begun working improvisationally with artists as diverse as Michael Snow, Malcolm Goldstein, and Martin Arnold. She has collaborated with visual artists David Rokeby and Gunilla Josephson on sound installations in Toronto and at the Biennale di Venezia Architecture Exhibition.

She has appeared as a soloist in the festivals Rencontres musique écrite/musique improvisée, Montréal; the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival; the Vancouver New Music Festival; the Sound Symposium, St. John’s; Other Minds, San Francisco; Musicora, Paris; and the Kobe International Modern Music Festival, Japan. In 2001, she made her debut with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, playing the world première of Figures by Ann Southam for the Massey Hall New Music Festival. Her critically acclaimed first solo CD, “thethingsinbetween”, was released in 1999. In 2002, she received a Distinguished Alumna award from the University of Victoria, and a K.M. Hunter Award through the Ontario Arts Council. Past honours include numerous commissions and awards from the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, the Laidlaw Foundation, the Japan/Canada Fund, FACTOR, a German Academic Exchange Scholarship, a Commonwealth Scholarship, and a Chalmers Award.

Eve Egoyan trained in standard repertoire at the Victoria Conservatory of Music with Anne Brayshaw and Winifred Scott Wood, the University of Victoria with Eva Solar-Kinderman, the Banff Centre of Fine Arts with György Sebök, the Hochschule der Künste in West Berlin with Georg Sava, the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, with Hamish Milne, and in Toronto where she completed her M.Mus. at the University of Toronto with Patricia Parr.

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