Ann-Kristín Sofroniou

I'm a Cypriot-Swedish musician - pianist, composer, artistic researcher. I focus on contemporary classical and baroque music, and particularly the space in-between the two by combining experimental practices, artistic research, everyday life and self-made "games" as tools for exploration and creation. My artistic research focuses on musical borrowing - particularly, in contemporary works for piano (PhD “Recycling Music-Recycling Performance”, Trinity Laban Conservatoire, London, 2016). From 2018 to 2023 I worked at the Learning & Participation Department of the Greek National Opera, designing participatory and intercultural artistic projects.

I'm currently preparing the release of my album Darkness Visible (Protomaterial Records, due November 2026), featuring original electroacoustic works alongside music from Bach’s Partita in E minor BWV 830 using piano, keyboards, and soundscapes from everyday life.

current projects

DARKNESS VISIBLE (album release / Protomaterial records)

Darkness Visible moves between analog and digital sonic worlds, placing original electro-acoustic compositions in dialogue with movements from J.S. Bach's Partita in E minor BWV 830. Drawing on sound recordings from everyday life captured across Sweden, Greece, Austria and Mexico, the album weaves together improvisation, recomposition and original writing for piano and synthesizer. It moves fluidly between repertoire and free improvisation, acoustic and electronic sound, creating unexpected dialogues between materials, histories and contexts.

Structured as a continuous sequence, the album plays with notions of darkness and illumination: a moving darkness in which moments of light appear through contrast, humor and sonic polyphonies. The result is a shifting musical flow that accompanies movement through different spaces, like a soundtrack to everyday life.

DURATIONS (piano & cello duo)

DURATIONS is a piano & cello duo in collaboration with cellist Nina Vanhoenacker, who first met during a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in January 2024. Their work together began with Morton Feldman's Durations II, a piece they have returned to repeatedly, observing how their shared sense of time, space and togetherness shifts with each encounter. Their performances grow out of that first meeting, exploring spatiality, temporality and suspended timing as an ongoing artistic conversation through existing repertoire and improvisations. Their first concert together takes place at the Seigla Festival on 8 August 2026 with repertoire from Messiaen, Kurtág and Feldman.

WOMEN MOVING (musical podcast)

Women Moving is a musical podcast series in collaboration with composer Aida Shirazi. It revolves around music theatre, performance art, and storytelling to explore hidden and interesting stories of pioneering women in face of discrimination.

In each episode, we utilize a combination of live and pre-recorded acoustic and electronic compositions and sounds that create ambient spaces for each story to unfold and be amplified. The artistic output of this project culminates in the creation of both live interdisciplinary performances and recorded audio podcasts.

The first episode, “Lucky Star”, created at the Banff Centre as part of the Musicians in Residence programme in January 2025, introduces the story of Sally Ride - astronaut and the first American woman to go to outer space for NASA in 1983.

PIANOSCAPES (videos)

PIANOSCAPES is a living series of short videos that capture everyday moments and pair them with improvised music and re-compositions of classical music. Each piece explores the relationship between sound and image, transforming seemingly mundane scenes - whether from urban neighbourhoods or natural landscapes - into something reflective, evocative or unexpected. Rooted in a practice of musical borrowing as a relational and creative act, the project reimagines fragments of the classical tradition through a contemporary, participatory lens. The project highlights both the beauty in simplicity and the intricate complexity of life itself.

PIANOSCAPES / sound scenes from everyday life

PIANOSCAPES no.4 playing with form #piano #classicalmusic

00:35

PIANOSCAPES no.2 dance as you like and die happy #piano

00:50

PIANOSCAPES no.3 playing with a foot #piano #travel #classicalmusic

00:59

PIANOSCAPES no.5 Bach is with you always #piano

00:10

artistic research / musical borrowing

My artistic research explores musical borrowing as both a theoretical field and a living performance practice from the performer's perspective. My PhD thesis, 'Recycling Music, Recycling Performance: Exploring the Uses of Existing Music in Piano Works of Rochberg, Goehr and Sharman' (Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London, 2016), examines how performers can draw on a deeper understanding of pre-existing material to shape and enrich their interpretations. With a particular focus on contemporary piano works composed after the 1960s that borrow existing music in diverse ways, the research asks what it means to approach such works from the inside, as a performer navigating layers of history, intention and identity. The PhD was supported by a scholarship from the Onassis Foundation.

ABSTRACT

The subject of this dissertation is the use of existing music in three case studies since the1960s: George Rochberg’s Nach Bach, Fantasy for Harpsichord or Piano (1966), Alexander Goehr’s Symmetry Disorders Reach (2002), and Rodney Sharman’s Opera Transcriptions (1989-2013). The main objective of this research is to analyse and discuss the borrowings within these works from a performer’s perspective and to offer new possibilities of interpretation and concert programming, in which the relationship between the ‘source’ and new work is directly addressed both in theory and in practice. This interdisciplinary and intertextual research is situated within the discipline of creative practice and the field of musical borrowing, aiming at constantly interrelating theory and practice. Each case study is examined in the following sense: through the analysis of the intention of the composer in borrowing; my practical exploration of the borrowing from a performer’s standpoint; the exploration of relating the source with the new work within a performance; the meaning of the pre-existing material to the composer within the new composition; and the understanding of each case study within the general field of borrowing. The aforementioned actions have enabled a set of possibilities for performance and interpretation, as well as further insight and knowledge for each case study, and borrowing in the broader sense.

Rochberg’s Nach Bach is a ‘musical commentary’ of Bach’s Partita in E minor BWV 830 in which Rochberg experiments with the use of pre-existing material in various manners under the broader practice of collage. Goehr’s Symmetry Disorders Reach uses pre-existing pieces as models for composing new pieces with the intention of exploring the possibility of transparency between the source and new work. Sharman’s Opera Transcriptions, composed out of his admiration of Michael Finnissy’s Verdi Transcriptions (1972-2005), takes opera arias and transforms them into something new through the use of pre-existing material. The conclusion at which this research arrives at is that, in works of musical recycling, as the aforementioned case studies, the pre-occupation with the source, both in theory and practice, can be significantly impactful and insightful to the performance of these works. Additionally, through this process my interpretation of the source was similarly affected and recycled, thus offering a fresh approach of interpretation to past repertoire.The overall assumption of this research is that the exploration of musical borrowing can become the tool with which the performer can construct and realise a series of further performance projects.

Access the complete thesis here

media / past projects