© Elsa Okazaki
Yaara Tal's flexible musicality has always enabled her to establish herself with different instrumentations and stylistically on a wide range of activities. After several years of solo activity, Yaara Tal joined forces with Andreas Groethuysen to form a piano duo, which has since become the focus of their artistic activities. For many years, Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen concentrated their pedagogical activities on master classes at home and abroad. Since 2004, the duo Tal & Groethuysen supervised the master's degree program in piano duo at the University of Music and Theatre in Munich, and since 2014 also at the Mozarteum University.
Yaara Tal gave her first concert at the age of seven. She was supported by the American Israel Cultural Foundation throughout her youth and studied piano with Arie Vardi and composition with Abel Ehrlich and André Hajdu at the Rubin Music Academy in Tel Aviv. After graduating, she continued her studies with Hugo Steurer and Ludwig Hoffmann at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich with the help of a scholarship from the DAAD. Peter Feuchtwanger also counts her among her important teachers. Since the early 1990s, Yaara Tal has been part of the duo Tal & Groethuysen is also active in international concert life with appearances in most European countries, in Israel, Japan, China, North and South America. It was able to present itself in the world's most renowned event frameworks such as the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Philharmonie Berlin, Cologne and Munich, the Alte Oper Frankfurt, the Musikhalle Hamburg, the Hong Kong Arts Festival, the Lucerne Festival, the Teatro alla Scala Milan, the Frick Collection New York, the Forbidden City Concert Hall Beijing, the La Roque d'Anthéron Piano Festival, the Ruhr Piano Festival, the Salzburg Festival, the Wiener Musikverein, the Tonhalle Zurich etc. In 1995, the educational channel of the Japanese television NHK produced an eight-part series with the duo Series of Lessons for Piano Duos. An exclusive collaboration with the record company SONY CLASSICAL enabled the duo to produce a whole series of 30 CDs to date, which have met with a great response from the public and the press internationally, with numerous awards (including nine times the "Prize of the German Record Critics", five times the "Echo Prize" and the "Cannes Classical Award") and have enriched the market with several first recordings. The focal points of the publications certainly include the recordings of the complete works of Franz Schubert and Wolfgang Amadé Mozart.
