Seda Röder

“[Seda] You are a master of avant-garde pianism! Your dialogues with silence captivated me.

– Alfred Brendel

“Mrs. Röder is a very talented young pianist [...] In spite of her young age Mrs. Röder has a broad and interesting repertoire. She combines her excellent piano technique with musical maturity.”

– Dennis Russell Davies

“Her playing shows a nice combination of sensitivity on one side and musical intelligence on the other side. Her interests are reaching far beyond the limits of the piano repertoire.”

– Gerhard Oppitz

“In her excellent piano playing she combines awareness for style and form with musical warmth and depth.”

– Rolf Plagge

Lauded for her “musical intelligence„ (Gerhard Oppitz) and “her exemplary understanding of a wide range of musical styles” (Robert Levin), the Turkish pianist Seda Röder describes her artistic vision as “making music – old and new – more approachable for everyone“. In addition to her podcast series Blackbox about New Music, she puts this vision into realization in the form of lecture recitals and carefully chosen, visionary concert programs. As Seda commits herself to create exciting and refreshing concert programs, her insightful interpretations of a broad repertoire that ranges from Couperin to Stockhausen and beyond, bring her acclaim as one of the most interesting and engaging musicians of her generation. Seda’s performances were heard in concert halls throughout Europe, Turkey and the US, and aired on WPRB, Bayern2 and Açik Radio.

Devoted to promoting the music of our time, her latest album “Listening to Istanbul” – accompanied by the largest web platform for New Music from Turkey (newmusicistanbul.com) – is internationally recognized as a rare accomplishment and as a “musical triumph” (overgrownpath.com) that introduces the unexplored world of Turkish contemporary music to a wider audience.

In addition to her concert life, Seda has been an active scholar/performer at the Music Department of Harvard University where she researched the fascinating piano music from the contemporaries of Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. Her debut album — also inspired by her interest in scholarship and performance — brings together music of three centuries by composers who were active in Vienna: Mozart – Brahms – Berg, and was praised to be “a remarkable achievement, with electrifying performances of all three works” (amusicology.com).

Before arriving at Harvard University in 2007 Mrs. Röder graduated with distinction in the performance exams from the Mozarteum in Salzburg and worked intensively with the world-renowned Beethoven and Brahms specialist Gerhard Oppitz at the Musik Hochschule in Munich. In addition to her formal piano studies she focused on the study of period instruments and performance practice, explored orchestral repertoires as a guest student of Bruno Weil’s conducting class and attended master classes with András Schiff and Karl-Heinz Kämmerling.

For her extraordinary artistic achievements Seda Röder was awarded several prestigious fellowships, amongst them grants from the Austrian Department of Education, the German Academic Exchange Program, the merit-based scholarship of the “Alumni Foundation of the Austrian St. Georg-Kolleg, Istanbul”, as well as the Richard-Wagner-Scholarship in Munich.

Mrs. Röder is an Associate of the Music Department at Harvard University where she has served as the assistant to Robert Levin and has taught as a Teaching Fellow in Music History and Chamber Music.

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About Seda’s CD

“A remarkable achievement, with electrifying performances of all three works.”

– www.amusicology.com

“The performance of the Berg was superbly musical [...] a very poetic view of an important early 20th century masterpiece that can hold its own with established recordings by pianists such as [Mitsuko] Uchida and [Glenn] Gould.”

– Arthur S. Leonard

“Her poised, passionate recording of the Alban Berg Sonata is the most moving account of the work I have heard.”

– Sean Gallagher, Boston University

“This is a thoroughly superb recording, one that I will enjoy having in my library for some time to come.”

– Drew Massey, Harvard University

Listen to the new CD