Rami Khalife

Born on September 25, 1981, in Beirut, Lebanon, pianist Rami Khalifé received an early, brief exposure to the keyboard before departing his homeland at seven. He later resumed formal studies in Paris at the Conservatoire National de Région de Boulogne-Billancourt, where Alfred Herzog served as director. His teachers there included Louis-Claude Thirion and Marie-Paule Siuguet, and he simultaneously pursued private instruction with Abdel Rahman El Bacha. During his Paris years he earned multiple competition prizes, most prominently at Radio France, UFAM, and the Claude Kahn events, which led to a 1994 recital at Gaveau Music Hall. He also joined the Boulogne-Billancourt Orchestra for a Middle East tour that featured Sergey Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 4 and Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G. Between 2000 and 2003 he continued his training at New York’s Juilliard School of Music. In collaboration with Francesco Schlime he presented several two-piano improvisation concerts, one of them the first ever staged at the institution, while studying piano with Hungarian artist Gyorgy Sander, himself a student of Béla Bartók; Khalifé completed his Juilliard degree in May 2003. Since 2000 he has joined his father, the Lebanese composer and oud player Marcel Khalifé, for worldwide performances. Together with clarinetist Kinan Azmeh the pair has appeared throughout the Middle East and the United States in both notated and improvised programs, and they later traveled to South America for concerts with Brazilian cellist Fabio Presgrave. In 2005 Khalifé and Schlime formed the duo Aufgang, combining two pianos with electronics to present original works that blend contemporary, modern, and experimental approaches. He has issued two recordings: Live in Beirut, devoted to solo-piano readings of classical repertoire, and Scene from Hellek, a program of original solo pieces. Additional projects include appearances with Moscow’s Russian Globalis Symphony Orchestra and the score for a film by Lebanese director Wael Noureddine.