Piano Four Hands Recital - Fiametta Tarli and Ivo Varbanov

International Music Series

But artists and musicians are used to adverse life: Fiammetta and Ivo are going to try again with two concerts before the Summer, with the season proper starting in the Autumn 2022. There will be monthly concerts in the same venue (the Chiswick Catholic Centre in Dukes Avenue).

The first two concerts in June-July 2022 feature Fiammetta and Ivo’s own performance with a piano four hand programme (10th June 2022), and a piano jazz-fusion concert by the Bulgarian pianist Milen Kirov (8th July 2022).

Fiammetta and Ivo were already the organisers of a season in Clerkenwell, in the church of the Order of St. John. Their beautiful instrument, a 205 Steingraeber piano, handcrafted in Bayreuth, rarely seen in British concert halls, is the fulcrum of the new season in Chiswick, featuring many performances involving the piano and classical music, but not only: the two pianists are also planning some jazz and fusion performances.

Their aim is that of founding a music club for the Chiswick community, thus rekindling the spirit of music in this enchanting corner of London.


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The performance of Fiammetta Tarli and Ivo Varbanov are consistently stylish and enjoyable: these musicians resist the temptation to over-inflect this music, but they are always alert to details and always find an attractive range of colour on a beautiful and characterful modern piano by the Bayreuth firm Steingraeber…It is a splendid IRR debut from the new ICSM label. –Nigel Simone, IRR

A dizzying experience… Husband and wife Ivo Varbanov and FiammettaTarli bring sparkle and swing…on…the first outing on their new label.—Stephen Pritchard, The Observer

Simple and subtle approach of Varbanov/Tarli…Their subtle use of rubato, of agogic accents, of pause and breath belie that they are two separate performers playing here, so in tune, so in sync are their conceptions of this music. This is, simply put, Brahms as it should be played.—Scott Noriega, Fanfare

Schubert’s Wanderer, forever lost in a nostalgic idyll in the utopian land of Nowhere, meets here its Schumanesque counterpart: in Bilder aus Osten (Pictures from the East), the Musician-Poet is inspired by Al-Hariri of Basra’s Die Verwandlungen von Abu Serug (The Metamorphosis of Abu Serug), an Arabic set of poems with German translation by Friedrich Rueckert.

The wondrous wandering continues with the encounter of other Romantic characters by the plume of Henrik Ibsen: Edward Grieg composed the incidental music for the premiere of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in Christiania (Oslo) on the 24th of February 1876. In Grieg’s arrangement of the Suite No. 1 for piano four hands we find some unforgettable scenes: the idyllic Morning Mood, the death of Peer Gynt’s mother (Åses), the dance of the chieftain’s daughter Anitra, who cheerfully robs Peer Gynt of all his possessions whilst seducing him, and finally, the Troll Mountain King, whose motto Peer Gynt adopts in the strange wanderings shaping his whole existence: 'Be true to yourself and to hell with the world.' Peer Gynt ends his journey as an old man as poor as when he started it, still retaining an aura of childish innocence which will save him in the end - perhaps.

The final stage of this Romantic journeying brings the listener to the wiser shore of Brahms’s New Love Song Waltzes in his four-hand version. Here Brahms outlines in the space of one-two minutes per song a sublime diversity of moods and characters. The texts of these songs collected by Georg Friedrich Daumer come from folksongs of different European countries, from Turkey to Poland, Latvia, and Italy (Sicily), closing the set with the ethereal Conclusion by Goethe: Now, you Muses, enough. The music stops but continues to linger in our minds with haunting persistence.

Fiammetta Tarli plays regularly all over Europe, both as a soloist and in different chamber music groups, including Ofer Falk (former first violin of the Allegri Quartet), Rohan De Saram (former cellist of the Arditti Quartet), David Cohen, Roger Chase, conductors Muhai Tang, Stanislav Oushev, Massimiliano Caldi, and Martin Georgiev, as well as her husband Ivo Varbanov (two pianos - four hands). Composers Silvina Milstein and Martin Georgiev have composed for Fiammetta and Ivo as piano duo.

Between 2018 and 2019 Fiammetta has performed in the United Kingdom, Bulgaria (Sofia Soloists: première of Diptych of Light and Time, Concerto for two pianos and string orchestra composed for Fiammetta and Ivo by Martin Georgiev; Varna Philarmonic Orchestra, and Shumen Philarmonic Orchestra), Italy, France, Germany, Austria (Kammerorchester Arpeggione), Poland (Gdansk Philarmonic Orchestra). She also made her debut as soloist in China with the Tianjin Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Muhai Tang.

Highlights of her engagements include performances at Cadogan Hall and St John Smith Square (London), West Road Concert Hall (Cambridge), Royal Concert Hall, New Auditorium (Glasgow), Honeywell Music Room (Oxford), St Georges (Bristol), Tianjin Concert Hall (China), Sala Bulgaria (Sofia), and at festivals such as 'Brahms Unwrapped' at the Kings Place (London), Wye Valley Music Festival (United Kingdom), 'Conciertos Temáticos' in Santander (Spain), the Sofia Music Weeks (Bulgaria), the International Chamber Music Festival 'Konvergencie' in Bratislava, Piano Extravaganza (Sofia), Les concerts du foyer Européen (Luxembourg), Ohrid Summer Festival (Macedonia), Sofia Philarmonic Season, etc.

Fiammetta started studying piano at the age of five with Giampiero Semeraro in Pisa, her hometown, and gave her first concert at nine. She earned her diploma in Piano Performance and Music Studies at the Florence Conservatoire at the age of seventeen. She specialised in solo repertoire with Maria Tipo, Lydia Rocchetti Pezzati and Ilonka Deckers in Italy, and in chamber music with Iain Ledingham at Royal Academy of Music, London. She participated several times in masterclasses with Alexander Lonquich and Elio Battaglia. Her keen interests in literature and musicology prompted her to achieve her Master of Musicology and PhD at King’s College London. She has been leading masterclasses herself in London and at the Radom National Music School in Poland.

Together with Ivo Varbanov, Fiammetta founded a new audiophile record label: Independent Creative Sound and Music (ICSM) Records.

Her concerts have been broadcast by RAI and Rete Toscana Classica (Italy), Slovak, Bulgarian and Spanish National Radios. Fiammetta’s recordings - two of them with Gega New, Bulgaria, five with ICSM Records and one with Lorelt Records (first recording of In a bowl of grey blue leaves for two pianos, composed by Silvina Milstein and dedicated to the duo Tarli-Varbanov), with two more along the way - have received wide acclaim by the international press (International Record Review, Rivista Musica, Fanfare, Observer, Klassisk Musikkmagasin, HI-FI+). Her projects being published in the next months include: Mozart's two-piano concertos (K 365 and K 242) recorded with the English Chamber Orchestra, Brahms’s two-piano compositions recorded with Ivo on Steingraeber pianos in Bayreuth and then in London, Menuhin Concert Hall, and the recordings of Mozart Piano Concertos K 466 and 467 (January 2022, with cadenzas newly composed for her by Martin Georgiev) with the Tippett String Quartet in London.

Fiammetta’s most recent project is going to be the world premiere of Martin Georgiev’s Piano Concerto, composed for her in 2022, and its subsequent recording.

Ivo Varbanov is a leading figure in Bulgarian music and culture at home and abroad.

After an enforced break from performing from 2009 to 2012 as a consequence of Leukaemia, he returned to the London stage with impressive performances at the Royal Festival Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Kings Place in the ‘Brahms Unwrapped’ season and at Cadogan Hall.

Ivo is a recipient of the Ivan Vazov Award for the popularisation of Bulgarian Culture abroad, and in 2011 he was awarded the Silver Lion Award from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2019 he became an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music. His performances have been broadcast on Bulgarian National Radio, BBC Radio, RAI 3, France Music, Radio Toscana Classica, Classic FM+, Canadian Radios, Spanish National Radio, Slovak National Radio, Bulgarian National TV, BTV and TV Bulgaria.

In 2017 Hyperion Records released a recording of Dimitar Nenov’s Piano Concerto and Ballade No. 2 with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by maestro Emil Tabakov. It received wide international acclaim, garnering an average rating of 4.5/5 stars from the music critics. To date, Ivo has made thirteen commercial recordings for Hyperion Records, Gega New,B.N.R., Lorelt Recordsand ICSM Records (the record label he founded with his wife, the pianist Fiammetta Tarli).

His performances include concertos, recitals and chamber music in more than twenty countries across three continents. Career highlights include multiple performances in London at the Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall, Kings Place, Cadogan Hall and St John’s, Smith Square. Other appearances in the UK include the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow, the Freeman Concert Hall in Manchester, St George’s, Bristol, and the West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge. Further afield, he has performed at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, the Bulgaria Concert Hall in Sofia and the Philharmonic Hall in St Petersburg.

Ivo has performed as a soloist with some of the world’s finest orchestras. These include the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Turku Philharmonic, Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra, Bulgarian National Symphony Orchestra, Sofia Soloists, St Petersburg State Symphony, Tianjin Symphony Orchestra, Orquestra Filarmônica de Minas Gerais and the Gdansk Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by such distinguished conductors as Leif Segerstam, Emil Tabakov, Muhai Tang, Alexander Kantorov, Stanislav Oushev, Massimiliano Caldi, Mikolaj Djadura, Yordan Dafov, Martin Georgiev, and Jacques Cohen.

His recent chamber music collaborations include concerts with his wife Fiammetta Tarli and Konstantin Lifschitz (two pianos, four hands), the violinist Ofer Falk, violist Jitka Hosprová, cellists László Fenyö, Seeli Toivio, Jozef Lupták and Hillel Zori, the Allegri Quartet and the horn player Tanja Nisonen. Ivo has appeared at many international festivals, including ‘Music Weeks in Sofia’, Cervo Summer Festival, Ohrid Summer Festival, Chopin Marienbad Festival, Apollonia Arts Festival, Carniarmonie Festival and the Lodz Contemporary Music Festival.

Ivo started to play the piano at the age of six in his home town Pleven in Bulgaria with Eleonora Karamisheva. A few years later he studied with Riccardo Bertazzolo and the renowned Hungarian teacher Ilonka Deckers in Italy. After his graduation at the age of twenty, he moved to the UK to work with Sulamita Aronowsky at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and with Frank Wibaut at the Royal Academy of Music in London, completing his postgraduate studies in 1998 (on a Rotary Foundation Scholarship). Ivo also studied privately with Dennis Lee and has been inspired in masterclasses by such renowned teachers as the pianists Alexander Lonquich, Barry Douglas and Lev Naumov. He has been leading masterclasses himself at the Bulgarian National Music School in Sofia, the Lucerne School of Music in Switzerland and the Radom National Music School in Poland.

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May 31, 2022