Pianist SooJin Anjou graduated from the Juilliard School in 2002 as the only person ever to win both of Juilliard’s undergraduate commencement prizes, for achievement in music and the liberal arts. While at Juilliard, she was a recipient of the Vladimir Horowitz Scholarship and, having won the school’s annual concerto competition, performed Mozart's Piano Concerto K.482 with the Juilliard Orchestra conducted by Otto-Werner Mueller. While still a student, she was prominently featured in Asahi-TV’s documentary “New York, New Yorkers”, which was televised in many parts of Asia and released on DVD.
Ms. Anjou is an avid performer of contemporary music, and composers have been entrusting their work to her since she was 15. As a member of the New Juilliard Ensemble, she premiered or performed works by, among others, Valentin Silvestrov, Elena Kats-Chernin and David Del Tredici. In 1999, she was soloist with the Ensemble in Lee Hyla's Piano Concerto No.2, at Alice Tully Hall.
More recently, Germany’s KulturRadio broadcast Ms. Anjou’s performance of transcriptions by Godowsky, and she received a standing ovation for her tour-de-force rendition of the "Hammerklavier" Sonata at the Budapest Liszt Museum. Upcoming engagements include recitals featuring the complete Transcendental Etudes of Liszt, and the complete works for solo piano by Ravel.
In addition to her solo playing, Ms. Anjou devotes herself with enthusiasm to chamber music, especially with voice: she has received intensive coaching from Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Julia Varady on the Lied repertoire, and plays with singers in diverse genres.
A native of South Korea, Ms. Anjou spent her formative years in the United States, making her Boston Symphony Orchestra debut at 16 with Prokofiev's 3rd Piano Concerto. She became known in Europe after winning a prize at the Robert Schumann Competition in Germany, and is currently based in Berlin. There, she is an active member of Live Music Now!, an initiative of the late Sir Yehudi Menuhin that brings live music to people otherwise unable to hear it, through performances in hospitals, nursing homes, schools for the handicapped, and prisons.
Ms. Anjou's major teachers include Klaus Hellwig (Berlin), Ferenc Rados (Budapest), Jacob Lateiner (New York), Wha-Kyung Byun (Boston), and Ick-choo and Hae-Young Moon (Los Angeles). Other musicians who have made a lasting impact on her artistry include Russell Sherman, Fabio Bidini and Tatiana Nikolaeva.