RIAM announces two new Head of Faculty appointments

The Royal Irish Academy of Music has announced the appointment of Professor Diane Daly as Head of Strings and Professor Tanya Gabrielian as Head of Keyboard for 5-year terms at Ireland's National Conservatoire. Professor Daly succeeds violinist Professor Sarah Sew who was Head of Strings for 5 years, and Professor Gabrielian succeeds pianist Professor Colma Brioscú who was Head of Keyboard for 8 years. Professor Brioscúand Professor Sew will remain on the RIAM teaching faculty from the academic year 2023/2024, with Professor Sew continuing as Head of Chamber Music.  

Professor Diane Daly is a violinist, educator and innovator. She made her debut as a soloist with the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra at the age of 13, has played principal with all the major Irish orchestras and toured internationally with ensembles including The Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the European Union Chamber Orchestra. She has been a member of the Irish Chamber Orchestra since 1997 and is in demand as a soloist and chamber musician at festivals at home and abroad. Prior to taking up the post at RIAM, Diane was Course Director of the MA in Classical String Performance at the University of Limerick, and over this time, devised a number of exciting and innovative projects both in Ireland and across Europe that developed the concepts of embodiment, presence, creativity and connection.

Professor Tanya Gabrielian has captivated audiences worldwide with her gripping performances. She has performed on five continents in acclaimed venues, including Carnegie Hall in New York, Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Sydney Opera House, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Wigmore Hall in London, and the Salle Cortot in Paris, with such orchestras as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and Boston Pops. Prior to taking up the post at RIAM, Tanya Gabrielian was Chair of Piano at Boston University and Martin Endowed Chair and Professor of Practice at Indiana University South Bend.

Commenting on the announcement, Deborah Kelleher, Director of the RIAM, said: "I am delighted that Diane Daly and Tanya Gabrielian have joined the RIAM in these important leadership roles as Head of Strings and Head of Keyboard at an exciting time of change and development for our organisation. Both experienced performers and dedicated educators, I am confident that their  passion, energy and vision will see exciting new curricula and partnership developments under their leadership."

 Professor Daly and Professor Gabrielian take up their appointment from the academic year 2023/2024. 

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Professor Diane Daly

Professor Diane Daly is a violinist, educator and innovator. 

She made her debut as a soloist with the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra at the age of 13, has played principal with all the major Irish orchestras and toured internationally with ensembles including The Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the European Union Chamber Orchestra. She has been a member of the Irish Chamber Orchestra since 1997 and is in demand as a soloist and chamber musician at festivals at home and abroad. In other genres, she has performed and recorded alongside many of the biggest names in rock and leads her own gypsy jazz trio.

Diane has always run a parallel career as educator and community musician. She has founded two successful string schools in the mid-West and has extensive experience teaching at all levels. Her teaching focus is on the development of the whole musician as a creative artist, fostering joy-filled music-making, autonomy and self-expression.  She is a qualified Dalcroze Eurhythmics teacher and, in recent years, became Europe’s first accredited string-playing Body-Mapper. 

In 2019 she completed an Irish Research Council scholarship-funded PhD exploring the impacts of Dalcroze and related techniques on her professional performance practice. From this research emerged a number of insights and new approaches that became Creative Embodied String Performance (CESP). This incorporates exploring fresh approaches to devising, preparing and performing repertoire. CESP has been successfully piloted with a range of international student and professional ensembles, and her work has been published in numerous prestigious academic journals. In 2022, her doctoral research was awarded the inaugural Aloys Fleischmann Prize for outstanding practice-based research.

Diane has been the Course Director of the MA in Classical String Performance at the University of Limerick since 2018. Over this time, she has devised a number of exciting and innovative projects in Ireland and across Europe, developing the concepts of embodiment, presence, creativity and connection.

Professor Tanya Gabrielian

Hailed by the London Times as a “pianist of powerful physical and imaginative muscle”, Tanya Gabrielian has captivated audiences worldwide with her gripping performances. She has performed on five continents in acclaimed venues including Carnegie Hall in New York, Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Sydney Opera House, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Wigmore Hall in London, and the Salle Cortot in Paris, with such orchestras as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and Boston Pops. 

Tanya shot onto the international stage at the age of twenty with back-to-back victories in the Scottish International Piano Competition and Aram Khachaturyan International Piano Competition. Since then, performance engagements have included Alice Tully Hall and the 92nd Street Y in New York, Dame Myra Hess Concert Series in Chicago, Seoul Arts Center in Korea, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, an eleven-city tour of China, and a return recital engagement at Wigmore Hall in London. Tanya’s Southbank debut recital in the Purcell Room in London, presented by the Philharmonia Orchestra, was chosen as “Performance of the Year” by Seen and Heard International. Her Wigmore Hall debut, as winner of the coveted Wigmore Prize awarded by the Royal Academy of Music, was reviewed as “revelatory, a feast of romantic pianism which held us enthralled” and “an astounding achievement by any standards, and one I cannot imagine being bettered… Remember the name—Tanya Gabrielian—you will be hearing a lot more from her I feel sure.” Tanya’s latest recording, Remix: Bach Transcriptions, was released on MSR Classics and was selected as Album of the Week by radio stations in Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. She has also been featured on the cover of the magazine Clavier.

In addition to the traditional concert stage, Tanya is passionate about inspiring new generations of musicians and music lovers in diverse settings, dedicated to community engagement, education, and activism through art. Projects have included collaborations with the National Alliance on Mental Illness in programs featuring composers with mental illnesses, highlighting the stigma around mental health issues; a TEDx Talk at the Howard Thurmond Center for Common Ground; founding an interactive performance series for patients at the New York State Psychiatric Institute; an installation with the artist Fran Bull for the exhibit In Flanders Fields: A Meditation on War; and a multidisciplinary collaboration combining Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross with final statements from executed death row inmates. Tanya was awarded the Pro Musicis International Award, McGraw-Hill Robert Sherman Award for Music Education and Community Outreach, Salon de Virtuosi Career Grant, and the S&R Washington Award for her work, and she has held Artist-in-Residencies at Guild Hall and 23Arts.

Tanya’s interests have always been diverse. Admitted to Harvard University to study biomedical engineering at the age of sixteen, Tanya instead pursued a career in music, completing her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the Royal Academy of Music in London, originally studying both piano and viola. She received the prize for the best final recital for all six years of study and received a DipRAM, the highest performance award given by the Royal Academy of Music. Tanya was the only candidate accepted for the prestigious Artist Diploma, an extraordinarily selective post-graduate residency program, at The Juilliard School, and received a Doctor of Musical Arts from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Tanya was appointed Head of Keyboard at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in 2023. Prior to joining the faculty at RIAM, she was Chair of Piano at Boston University and Martin Endowed Chair and Professor of Practice at Indiana University South Bend.