Mikayel Hakhnazaryan

Cellist Mikayel Hakhnazaryan is a longtime member of the Kuss Quartet. He has also performed and recorded as a soloist, and he is a prominent orchestral cellist. Hakhnazaryan was born in Yerevan, Armenia, in 1976. He is apparently unrelated to cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan, but his family was musical, and he attended the Komitas National Conservatory of Music in Yerevan. After graduating, he moved to Sion, Switzerland, for studies with violinist Tibor Varga and cellist Marcio Carneiro. Hakhnazaryan went on for further lessons from cellist Ivan Monighetti at the Musikakademie Basel. He also attended master classes with cellist Steven Isserlis and has named those as especially influential. From 2001 to 2003, Hakhnazaryan was a member of the Zurich String Trio. He joined the Basel String Quartet in 2004 and remained with that group until 2008, when he joined the Kuss Quartet in Berlin, Germany. In 2011, he released a recording of string quartets with that group on the Onyx label. Hakhnazaryan is best known as a chamber player, and he remained a member of the Kuss Quartet as of the early 2020s. That group has appeared in such major halls as the Philharmonie in Berlin, New York's Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall in London, and the Musikverein in Vienna, as well as prominent festivals in Salzburg, Lucerne, Switzerland, and elsewhere. Hakhnazaryan served as guest principal cello with the Basque National Orchestra and, since 2014, has been principal cello of the Munich Chamber Orchestra. He has made guest appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic and its chamber music groups, including the celebrated 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic, as well as with many other groups such as the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Camerata Bern, and Kammerorchester Basel. Hakhnazaryan joined pianist Sofia Melikyan and violinist David Haroutunian on a 2021 recording of Brahms' Piano Trios Nos. 2 and 3 on the Rubicon label. Two years later, he released the recital Inner World on the same label with pianist Lia Hakhnazaryan.
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