Angela Cholakian began to take piano lessons in Russia at the age of four. She was already a pupil of a music school when she was six, and when she was thirteen, she was accepted by the "Tchaikovsky Central School for Gifted Children", where she caused a sensation with public performances of Liszt's E flat major, Chopin's F minor and Brahms's D minor piano concertos. At the age of seventeen she began to study music at the Moscow Conservatory with Yevgeny Malinin, Heinrich Neuhaus's last assistant. She was particularly renowned for her dedication to contemporary works and for the meticulousness with which she worked on these with their composers, for example the famous Arno Babajanian, whose complete piano works she performed in concert.

 

    After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cholakian emigrated to America and founded the well-known "Tchaikovsky Music Academy" in Los Angeles, where piano in the tradition of classical Russian style was taught. For ten years she was the Director of this artistic academy, where numerous students from the "Curtis Institute of Music" and the famous "Juilliard School" came to take additional private lessons with Cholakian. During this period, she also received her American "Artist Diploma" and the "Dr. of Musical Arts in Piano Performance". Angela Cholakian, who has given concerts in America, Europe, Asia and the former Soviet Union, is a pianist whose phenomenal technique always serves her musical convictions and passion. Today, she also teaches as Professor for Piano at a Chinese Music University because she is convinced that the heritage of musical tradition will become increasingly important if "the world is not to be laid to waste time and again".

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    Cholakian makes tremendous demands on art, and the extremes of her artistic spectrum stand out clearly in her interpretations. They range from gentle, lyrical, finely-strung poetic expression to passionate, eruptive piano virtuosity that, despite its perfect technique, always serves the musical context and is never reduced to showmanship. Angela Cholakian thus seems to be a worthy successor to the art of such pianists as Gilels and Richter, although she is more convinced than either of these that her legacy must be passed on "if everything is to be meaningful".