One of Sri Lanka’s foremost, award winning and internationally acclaimed concert composer-pianists Dr. Tanya Ekanayaka returns to St. Martins for yet another solo recital. She will be presenting her recital at the venue on January 20 at 1 pm.
Classically trained and with a background in popular and South Asian musics, she is also an improviser, musicologist and highly qualified linguist. Her critically acclaimed debut album of her own compositions for solo piano performed and produced by her and titled ‘Reinventions: Rhapsodies for Piano’ was launched worldwide by Naxos Records (Grand Piano) in March 2015.
This album introduces a genre developed by Tanya Ekanayaka and also represents the first album of compositions entirely by a Sri Lankan composer to be launched globally by a major record label. Although trained as a pianist, her compositional skills are the result of a purely intuitive and natural development.
Often the first Sri Lankan compositions to ever be performed at premiere international concert venues Tanya Ekanayaka’s compositions have also been featured on international media such as BBC World Radio and BBC World News Television as part of exclusive interviews. Tanya Ekanayaka has also in recent years developed a pioneering music composition project on a purely voluntary basis aimed at empowering traumatised as well as underprivileged Sri Lankan children and youth recovering from the civil war which ravaged the nation for over thirty years.
Resident in the United Kingdom she is on the part-time teaching faculty of Edinburgh University where she has taught in both its Departments of Linguistics and Music since 2007.
Tanya Ekanayaka is currently working on her second album of her own compositions for solo piano also for Naxos Records (Grand Piano).
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