Bernice Sammut Attard, one of Malta’s leading young musicians, is giving a piano recital at the Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valletta, on Saturday. The programme consists of works by Bach, Bartok, Wagner/Liszt and Chopin.
Pianist and violinist Sammut Attard, 22, is in her fourth and final year of a Bachelor of Music degree at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow. She studies piano with professors Fali Pavri and Petras Geniušas. Ruth Hahn is her violin teacher.
She was recently awarded the Conservatoire’s prestigious Sibelius Essay Prize for her work on Scriabin’s Modernist Ideas and the ABRSM teaching diploma with distinction.
Sammut Attard started her music studies at an early age, studying piano with Karen Briscoe and violin with Marcelline Agius. She was the first Maltese to attend the prestigious UK music school, Chetham’s School of Music, in Manchester, where she attended Sixth Form and studied piano and violin as a joint principal study with Duncan Glenday and Ruth Hahn respectively from 2016-2018.
In 2017, she was a finalist in the Chetham’s Bosendorfer competition and in the same year she was awarded second prize in the Malta International Music Competition together with an honourable mention prize in violin and joint third prize and joint best Maltese pianist in the Malta International Piano Competition.
In 2018, she won the Malta Eurovision Young Musicians 2018 competition and represented Malta in Edinburgh in the same year. She has performed in many countries including the UK, Poland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan and in Seattle, the US.
She performed the Grieg Piano Concerto with a number of orchestras ‒ including the North Caucasus Orchestra, the Eurasian Symphony Orchestra, the Ryazan Symphony Orchestra and the Astrakhan Symphony of the Astrakhan Opera and Ballet Theatre ‒ collaborating with conductors like Alexei Galea Cavallazzi, Mikhail Kirchhoff, Sergey Oselkov and William Garfield Walker. These concerts were organised by the European Foundation for support of Culture as part of the ‘Days of Maltese Music’ programme in Armenia, Kazakhstan and Russia.
She also gave a piano recital at the MCC in March 2020.
The piano recital will take place at La Valette Hall, at the Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valletta, on Saturday, June 4 at 7.30pm. Children under 12 years enter for free. For more information, call on 2559 5750 or visit www.showshappening.com.