Sonya Bach

Pianist Sonya Bach has parlayed child prodigy status and top-notch training into an international career. She often performs rarely played repertory, and she has premiered unusual Western music in Korea. Bach was born in South Korea in 1981. Her Korean name is 박소연 (Park So-yeon), and she uses the name 소냐 바흐, Sonya Bach, with 바흐, Baheu, being a way of representing the name Bach in Korean. She has often been asked if she were related to the German composer. She took up the piano at age three, and two years later, she was concertizing; she made her concerto debut with the Seoul Symphony Orchestra in 1990. Bach attended the Yewon Arts University in Korea's Jeonbuk province, studying with Kyung Sook Lee. During her teen years, she studied with Cheng Zong Yin and traveled to New York for classes with Mordecai Shehori, a protege of Vladimir Horowitz. She won a scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York, where she worked with Olegna Fuschi, and another to the Accademia Pianistica Incontri col Maestra in Imola, Italy, studying there with Lazar Berman. A protegee of pianist Alicia de Larrocha, Bach went on to the Academia Marshall in Barcelona, Spain, where she earned a master's degree in Spanish music. Bach won the Gina Bachauer Memorial Award in 1996, and the Special Prize at the 12th Viotti-Valsesia International Music Competition in Italy, the St. Charles International Piano Competition in the U.S., and the Eugen d'Albert International Music Competition in Switzerland (2012) helped her make the transition from child prodigy to adult artist. She has appeared at top venues across Europe, North America, and Asia and has toured South Korea several times. She gave the premiere of Joaquín Turina's Rapsódica Sinfónica with the Seoul Symphony Orchestra and has often toured in Korea playing major Western classics such as the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto in B flat minor, Op. 23, and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Bach records for the Rubicon Classics label. In 2017, she issued an album of music by J.S. Bach. In 2021, she returned with a Rachmaninov recital.
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