Pianist Valentina Babor: “Armenians are very musical and soulful nation”

Valentina Babor, one of the most popular and outstanding pianists, will perform with the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra in Yerevan on May 16. Under the baton of conductor Sergey Smbatyan, the pianist will perform Frederick Chopin’s Piano Concerto No.1. At the concert, the orchestra will also perform the Symphony No. 2 of Alexander Borodin.

Valentina Babor is in Armenia for the third time and says she is always pleased to visit Armenia.

“My mother and I love Yerevan very much. Unfortunately, my mother can’t be here this time with me, because she has a broken leg”, said the pianist.

“Every time when I come to Yerevan I have the feeling that Armenian people are very musical and soulful. I love that. And a lot of my favorite artists have an Armenian background: Patrick Fiori for example or the unforgettable Charles Aznavour”, she told Armenpress.

Valentina Babor is going to perform Chopin’s Piano Concerto No.1 in Yerevan. She notices that this is one of her favorite works, and she associates a very special and familiar story of her life with this music. “My grandfather, who was a pianist too, before he founded the BABOR Cosmetics, was playing this concerto in a charity concert for wounded people of the Second World War. He was also one of the first who heard me on the piano when I was a little child and one of his biggest wishes before he died was, that I will have the power to live his dream: to become a pianist.”

Every musician has his/her favorite composer. Babor adores Mozart and Chopin.

The pianist got her first piano, violin and vocal lessons at the age of 5. What is more intimate to her? The pianist noticed that when she was a kid, she always wanted to play the violin: “Maybe it is because my mother, a ballet dancer, took me very often with her to the theatre and I was very impressed by the performances of violinists. But my parents thought I was too young and small for a violin and they first bought a piano. I started to improvise a bit on this new instrument, and some musicians and friends of my parents meant that I was not completely untalented. So they began to support me, and I had a lot of fun with it. Maybe I chose the piano in the end, because I was already more advanced on this instrument then in playing violin for example. When I am thinking about it today, I would maybe have become a singer, if I did not become a pianist. Because singing is in my opinion the most natural and direct musical expression of our soul, and good singers are the greatest inspiration for me”.