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Fazil Say, son of musicologist Ahmet Say, established a substantial dual career as a pianist and composer during the 1990s. As a performer, he has won numerous competitions and has performed with some of the finest orchestras worldwide. He is also active as a jazz pianist and regularly performs at international jazz festivals. His compositions have been broadly performed and recorded, and his works are published by Schott.
Say was born in Ankara, Turkey, and received his early training at the Ankara State Conservatory. He received a scholarship to study at the Robert Schumann Institute in Dusseldorf where he worked for five years with David Levine and he studied for three years at the Berlin Conservatory. In 1995 he won first prize in the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York. This immediately led to engagements around the world. He also won the Beracasa Foundation Prize in 1995, leading to a performance at the Festival International de Radio France-Montpellier. His first concerts in the United States after the appearance at the Young Concert Artists Auditions were at the 92nd Street "Y" in New York and at Kennedy Center in Washington. He has a strong interest in jazz and formed a quartet, Worldjazz, which began touring in 2000, and which has performed at the Montpellier, and at the Montreux and Istanbul Jazz Festivals.
He has performed with some of the world's great orchestras, including
New York Philharmonic, the
Concertgebouw Orchestra, the
Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the
BBC Philharmonic, and the
Orchestre National de France. His repertoire ranges from the Baroque to the contemporary and he has recorded works by
Bach,
Haydn,
Mozart,
Beethoven,
Liszt,
Tchaikovsky,
Stravinsky, and
Gershwin.
Say's compositions span a wide range of genres. He has written solo piano works, which he performs regularly, piano concertos, concertos for violin and for guitar, orchestral music, ballet, oratorios, chamber music, and film scores. His larger works are often programmatic, such as his first symphony, the Istanbul Symphony, which was premiered in 2010.