Nelly Akopian-Tamarina is a Russian pianist. Akopian-Tamarina had performed Haydn concertos publicly with orchestras by age 9. She studied with Anaida Sumbatyan at the MoscowCentral Music School. She continued her piano studies at the Moscow Conservatory, where she was one of the last students of Alexander Borisovich Goldenweiser, and the first of Dmitri Bashkirov. She won the Gold Medal at the 1963 Robert Schumann International Competition for Pianists and Singers in Zwickau. In 1974 she was awarded the Robert Schumann Prize. Akopian-Tamarina made several recordings for Melodiya, including the Chopin Preludes, op. 28, and the Piano Concerto of Robert Schumann, the last with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. Subsequently effaced from public life, blocked in the Soviet Union from giving concerts, she turned to painting, exhibiting her watercolours in Moscow. Akopian-Tamarina made her London début at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1983 playing Schumann and Chopin. Other highlights of the eighties included the Brahms Piano Quintet with the Vienna Musikverein Quartet; and a series of “Romantic Fantasia” recitals in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. From 1989 to 2006 her commitments included an artistic consultancy at the Prague Conservatory, masterclasses at the Pálfi Palace, and appointments in London at the Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music. Dating from this period, her first British recording, of the Schumann Fantasy, was featured in Brilliant Classics’ 2009 collection Legendary Russian Pianists. In October 2002, following an absence of twenty-five years, she was invited back to Russia, appearing in the Bolshoi Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Between 2008 and 2010 she gave a trilogy of recitals at the Wigmore Hall, dedicated to Brahms, Schumann, Janáček and Chopin. In 2017, her all-Brahms recording of the Variations and Fugue on a theme by Handel and Ballades, Op. 10 was released on Pentatone. These sessions were from 20 years earlier in Snape Maltings, and partly recorded surreptitiously, with Akopian-Tamarina unaware that the recording producer had returned to the studio for part of the sessions.
