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Lara Melda plays Chopin

Lara Melda won the BBC Young Musician 2010 competition, performing Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No. 2 in the final round with Vasily Petrenko and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in Cardiff. Since then she has also performed Mozart Piano Concerto K466 and Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

Lara made her BBC Proms and Royal Albert Hall debut this summer as one of the soloists performing with the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Andrew Gourlay in an evening devoted to previous Young Musician winners. Other concerto performances have included Britten’s Young Apollo with the Britten Sinfonia conducted by Paul Daniel (Barbican), Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto with the Royal Northern Sinfonia and Kirill Karabits (The Sage), Mozart K466 and K242 with the Aurora Orchestra and Nicholas Collon (Kings Place), the Grieg Concerto with English Sinfonia (St Johns Smith Square) and Beethoven 3 in a tour of New Zealand with the National Youth Orchestra of New Zealand. Amongst many venues over the UK and abroad she has played recitals at the Laeiszhalle (Hamburg), Les Sommets Musicaux in Gstaad (Switzerland), Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival (Germany) and Cadogan Hall (London). Lara made her Wigmore Hall recital debut in 2017, and followed this with another sold out recital there in January 2018.  She returns to the Wigmore Hall for a BBC Radio 3 live broadcast in December 2018 and an evening recital in November 2019. 

Lara Melda performs regularly in Turkey and made her debut at the International Music Festival in Istanbul in June 2011, playing the Grieg Concerto with the Borusan Philharmonic.  She has also been presented by the 'Istanbul Recitals' piano series and performed at the Antalya Piano Festival, Bogazici University and Zorlu Center.  In 2012 she received the prestigious 'Promising Young Artist' award from Kadir Has University and in 2015 was voted the 'Woman of the Year Arts Award' by Elele-Avon and the Turkish public. Lara returned to Turkey in May 2019 to perform Schumann’s Piano Concerto with the Cumhurbaşkanlığı Senfoni Orkestrası in Ankara. 

In the summer of 2016 Lara graduated from the Royal College of Music with a first class honours degree, where she studied with Ian Jones. She had begun piano lessons with Emily Jeffrey at the age of six. In 2015 Lara was the first scholarship holder under the Imogen Cooper Music Trust and she has lately worked with Alfred Brendel.