Dedicated to Tatiana Tower

We are honored to dedicate the competition to the outstanding Russian musician and teacher Tatiana Tower.

Tatiana Lazarevna Tower was born on September 29, 1945. She started to play harp, when she was 4 years old. She studied at the Gnessin school, her teacher was Mark Rubin, then (since 1963) - at the Moscow Conservatory by Ksenia Erdely and Vera Dulova. In 1969, she won the First International Harp Competition in Hartford; also she had laureate title of the Latin American countries International Festival of Music.

From 1968 to 1992 she worked as a soloist (harp) in the symphony orchestra of the Leningrad Philharmonic under the direction of the great conductor Evgeny Mravinsky. In 1973-1992 she taught at the Leningrad Conservatory (associate professor, then professor), and then at the Special Music School to the Conservatory. Tatiana Tower gave a lot of concerts in the USSR and abroad, she was a member of the jury of international competitions.

In 1992, she recorded in Los Angeles a solo disc “Harp the Russian Way”, which included Fantasia on the themes of Tchaikovsky's opera “The Queen of Spades” by Valery Kikta; this work was dedicated to harpist. In the same year, she and her family went to the city of Oviedo (Spain), from where in 1993 she moved to Hilversum (the Netherlands).

After a long and serious illness, Tatyana Lazarevna died in the Netherlands on July 27, 1994 at the age of 48. Today, a whole generation of harpists proudly calls themselves her followers and passes on her priceless legacy to their students.