artists-in-residence | program | space

in residence May/June, 2023:

Nikolaos Laaris

^{Nikolaos Laaris performing , Philip Glass Shards – Etudes for Piano, Book 1
Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Athens, Nostos Festival, 2021}

Nikolaos Laaris studied piano at the Royal College of Music (MMus), and has been awarded a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the Manhattan School of Music (DMA), where he served as a professor in addition to teaching at Columbia University and the University of Macedonia. He is the recipient of the Ballantine’s Gold Seal sponsorship, as well as of the RCM and MSM, the Alexander Onassis, J.F. Costopoulos and Lilian Voudouri Foundations scholarships.
He has appeared in Europe (South Bank Centre – London, Gärtnerplatz Τheater – Munich) and the USA (Carnegie Hall – Νew York), and has been featured as a soloist with Armonia Atenea Orchestra and the State Orchestras of Athens and Thessaloniki. In his London debut he was singled out by Stephen Pettit of the Times as “a fine artist, incapable of making an ugly sound”; for his collaboration with the Munich Ballet Theater in Goldberg Variationen, Dance Europe magazine hailed him as “the star of the evening”.
He studied conducting at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam (BMus), and has been collaborating with Armonia Atenea, conducting Philip Glass’ opera In the Penal Colony (OCC), musicals such as Bernstein’s West Side Story, Porter’s Kiss me Kate and Sakellaridis’ operetta The Godson (ACH), and new works such as Kipourgos’ Peace (National Theater), and Papadimitriou’s St Francis, and Through the looking Glass, a new audio-visual work based on Philip Glass’ Piano Etudes – I, with animation of G. Cherouvim (performed at Summer Nostos Festival), and the Greek premiere of Moises Kaufman’s theatrical play 33 Variations, in his own translation (ACH).