Eve Egoyan

curatorial attention to concept and detail that is so apparent in every Egoyan recital…ears made newly patient by Egoyan’s precise, elegant and highly sympathetic performance
The Globe and Mail

Eve Egoyan is an internationally celebrated Armenian-Canadian artist whose medium is the piano. She continually re-invents her relationship with her instrument through the creation and commissioning of new works, which she has performed around the world. Her performances encompass extremely contrasting sensibilities: from Alvin Curran’s five-hour long Inner Cities to Erik Satie’s miniatures; from minimalist Simple Lines of Enquiry by Ann Southam to maximalist new complexity works by Michael Finnissy; from the barely audible to roaring overtone-filled resonances; from the rigorous interpretation of a score to free improvisation. Egoyan’s artistic curiosity also includes collaborating with artists from a variety of disciplines including the exploration of technologies in relation to the piano.

Eve trained in classical repertoire at the Victoria Conservatory of Music; 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 (DAAD); the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, with Hamish Milne (Commonwealth Scholarship). She completed her M.Mus. at the University of Toronto with Patricia Parr (Chalmers Award). Eve is an elected Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, London.

Eve followed her curiosity into the world of contemporary music since arriving in Toronto thirty years ago, inspired by an emerging generation of Toronto-based composers.

She has recorded twelve solo CDs which have received accolades including “Best Classical” The Globe and Mail (1999), one of “Ten Top” classical discs, New Yorker magazine (2009), and “Top Classical Disc of the Year”, The Globe and Mail (2011). These discs primarily feature works which Eve commissioned. Renowned composers James Tenney (U.S./ Canada), Alvin Curran (U.S.), Ann Southam (Canada), Rudolf Komorous (Canada), Maria de Alvear (Germany), Michael Finnissy (Britain), Karen Tanaka (Japan), Martin Arnold (Canada), Linda Catlin Smith (Canada) and Jo Kondo (Japan) have written for her amongst many others.

Eve is one of Canada’s primary ambassadors for Canadian music abroad. She is one of fifty Canadian performers and conductors given the designation of “CMC Ambassador” by the Canadian Music Centre. Eve has performed as a solo artist at the following international festivals amongst others: Canberra International Festival, Luminato Festival, Sydney Festival, Klangspuren Festival, Transart Festival, Modulus Festival, PuSh Festival, Huddersfield Festival, ISCM (Vancouver), Kwadrofonik Festival, Other Minds Festival, Images Festival, 21C Festival, Nuit Blanche (Paris), Sound Symposium, Open Ears Festival, Dias da Música, Festival Domaine Forget, Vancouver International New Music Festival, and the Kobe International Modern Music Festival.

Eve received New Chapters funding from the Canada Council in 2017 to develop SOLO FOR DUET. In this work, she takes her piano explorations to a new level by augmenting its capacities and challenging its history. SOLO FOR DUET premiered at the Luminato Festival in Toronto and has toured internationally. Canadian documentary filmmaker Su Rynard has created a feature film, a web documentary and a short film in response to SOLO FOR DUET.

Eve began working with new technologies in 2009 when Open Ears Festival, Kitchener, commissioned Surface Tension (for disklavier and interactive visuals), a collaboration with media artist David Rokeby. More recently, Eve has created a series of works which delve into the space between what a piano can do and what she wishes a piano could do, combining acoustic piano with new technologies.

Eve presently continues to create work for augmented and acoustic piano, to research music by Armenian composers and to collaborate with animator Christopher Hinton in the creation of real-time animation in live performance.

This page was last updated in June 2023.