About the artist in a nutshell
Jasmin Fors’s (b. 1972) artistic work is founded on her education as a pianist. She started playing the piano at the age of five under the direction of Ritva-Tuuli Ahonen, attended Rauno Jussila’s piano class at the Lahti Conservatory, and completed her studies at the Sibelius Academy with Jussi Siirala and Matti Raekallio. She familiarised herself with composing for her first work, Four Pastiches for Piano (2003), which she wrote just before graduating. After this, her focus shifted towards fine arts in the form of art history studies and portrait painting in particular. The period included intensive drawing and painting and several trips both in Finland and abroad to study and paint. During these trips, she acquainted herself with the works of artists she admired.
Later, Fors’s artistic work concentrated on music, fine arts, and literature. Her works include painted and drawn portraits, compositions, poems, stories, and especially during recent years, piano recordings. A comprehensive listing of Fors’s works is available on her website in the form of an artistic diary.
In addition to her own works, Fors has recorded piano music by other Finnish composers. The recordings are included in the Piano Blend collections, accompanied by CDs (published by Uusinta Kustannusosakeyhtiö in 2010 and 2013). Fors has also created a video series featuring Chopin interpretations, Chopin@Home – Recording Series (YouTube).
Fors’s website has been acknowledged by the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (the leading web archiving service for collecting and accessing cultural heritage on the web), and it is included in the recording programmes of the music libraries at several US universities, including Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale, Chicago, and Pennsylvania.
Drawn with Autobiographite is Jasmin Fors’s first solo album, released in late 2021, for which she focuses on the core of piano literature of the Romantic era: The great and unique composers Chopin and Liszt and the deep-water pearls of their creative power. The record includes the composers’ musical autobiographies and self-portraits, drawn on the piano staff; it also reflects the pianist’s life intertwined with her musical development to date. Important and close to her heart during her journey as a pianist, the works selected for this recording involve an autobiographical strand. A complementary piece of the concept is Fors’s graphite self-portrait on the album cover.
Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor is a composition and an independent work of art that, with reason, could be considered the David statue of Western piano music – a great creative achievement and a masterpiece as a description of the man’s innermost self, just before Nietzsche and Freud. The work has accompanied the pianist for a long time, just waiting for the opportunity to break free and be recorded on disc. Chopin’s music, particularly G and F minor Ballades were Jasmin Fors’s first loves in piano music. They have guided her way into the depths of the world of music since the first days of her piano studies. With Liszt’s Sonata, they lay the foundation of Fors’s recording—a long-term dream of hers; Chopin’s Trois nouvelles études, a set of smaller musical gems, complements the recording.
