Kristina Arakelyan Composer

Kristina Arakelyan’s work as composer, pianist and educator is guided by a clear vision of music’s intrinsic power and purpose. Receiving encouragement for her at an early age for her beautifully crafted compositions and accomplished pianism, those solid foundations prepared the ground for many significant commissions. These include recent works for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, St Paul’s Cathedral, Anna Lapwood, the BBC Proms, the National Youth Choir of Great Britain, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Albert Hall, and the BBC Singers. Dreamland, Kristina’s solo debut album as both pianist and composer, was released on Apple Music’s Platoon label in February 2025, and she gave the first performance of her Piano Concerto with the Armenian State Symphony in the same month–a moment of great joy as a British-Armenian.

2024 saw new settings of two poems by Freeman Edwin Miller, written for the 70th anniversary of Newcastle Choral Society and a choral composition for Bold Tendencies, the pioneering south London arts festival. A commission from Britten Pears Arts, A Christmas Offering, was first heard at Snape Maltings and was written as a companion to Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, or to be performed as a stand-alone work. Her latest new work for the BBC Singers is a setting ofone of the ancient O Antiphons. O Adonai received its premiere at London’s Temple Church and was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in December 2024. A Christmas commission for the Huddersfield Choral Society followed the premiere of an arrangement of her carol Ave Maris Stella at New York’s Carnegie Hall, and she also wrote new works for Manchester-based Kantos Chamber Choir and the Choir of King’s College London.

In addition to the world premiere of her Piano Concerto, a new work for organist, Anna Lapwood, and the Philharmonia Orchestra–Toccata–received its premiere at the Royal Albert Hall in May 2025. Aurora, a new work for the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra with solo piano, with Kristina as the soloist, was written and recorded for broadcast in the same month.

Kristina’s professional break throughat the age of 15 was the beginning of a productive relationship with the BBC Singers, when she won first prize in the BBC Young Composers’ Competition. “They were the first professional ensemble I had contact with and hearing my New Year being performed by them left a lasting impression on me” she notes. “It was wonderful to work with the Singers and to be reunited with them in 2021 for Seascapes, a set of choral companions for the Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s Peter Grimes. It was an amazing experience to channel Britten’s language through my own lens and match my music to his.”

Seascapes belongs to a series of landmark opportunities that arose for Kristina during the Covid pandemic, including Star Fantasy for organ, written for Anna Lapwood, and her selection for the National Youth Choir of Great Britain’s Young Composers scheme. The latter provided the ideal conditions for Kristina to project her distinctive voice as a composer. “I have spent my twenties exploring many musical styles, in part because of my studies,” she reflects. “Although I love the creative process and complexities of ‘academic’ composition, lyricism, diatonic harmonies and modality are my natural habitat. My influences stem from the great composers of the classical tradition, such as Bach and Beethoven, and I am also fascinated in particular by the sound world of Renaissance polyphony and different folk music traditions. These aresome of the lasting influences on my music.”

Lyricism runs through Kristina’s song cycle, Penelope: Seven Ways to Wait, written for the 2022 Grimeborn festival in north London. The work was conceived in response to an approach from Ukrainian mezzo-soprano Anna Starushkevych and built in collaboration with director, poet and librettist Helen Eastman. It articulates the emotions of seven women from different epochs, from Penelope waiting for Odysseus to return from the Trojan wars to a young woman messaging her father on the front line in the present day.

A multitude of influences, practical, academic and cultural, stands behind Kristina Arakelyan’s music. Born in 1994 in Budapest to a non-musical Armenian family, she moved to Armenia when she was four. Her passion for music, initially triggered by a family visit to the opera during her early childhood and fuelled years later by the experience of singing in Armenian Apostolic Church choirs, intensified when she came to England at the age of twelve to take up a UK government Music and Dance Scheme scholarship to study at the Purcell School. She progressed to take undergraduate studies in composition and piano at the Academy of Music and a master’s degree in composition at the University of Oxford. During her postgraduate year at Oxford, she also served as a choral scholar at St Peter’s College. Kristina completed her formal training in2024 with a PhD in composition at King’s College London. Kristina’s teachers have included Valeria Szervanszky, Colin Stone and Raymond Fischer (piano) and Robert Saxton, Silvina Milstein, Sir George Benjamin (composition).

Kristina Arakelyan’s commitment to music education is reflected in an output of pieces designed for young musicians including the ABRSM piano syllabus alongside her teaching work at the Junior Royal Academy of Music and as an associate lecturer at the University of Surrey.