Hakan Ali Toker

Hakan Ali Toker was born in 1976 in a clinic in Adana, as the child of a family living in Mersin. His childhood was spent partly in Mersin and partly in Saudi Arabia, where he lived for a while due to his father's occupation. At the age of 8, his family got him a small electronic keyboard. Hakan began first by making random noises on this instrument, then playing tunes by ear, eventually improvising and composing. He got his first keyboard lessons from Meral Hamamioglu, in Mersin. He began his formal musical training in 1988 at the Istanbul University State Conservatory cello department. In 1989 he trasferred to the Bilkent University School of Music and Performing Arts Preperatory School piano department. After his second year in highschool he was also admitted in to the composition department. Thereafter he continued as a double-major. He began to concertize while a student, at age 15, with a recital he gave at the Mersin Hilton Hotel. At 17, he played his own works with the Sochi Municipal Orchestra and he gave concerts with this orchestra introducing symphonic and traditional Turkish music to the Russian public. That same year he became the youngest artist to take stage at the Istanbul International Music Festival. The following year he became the first Turk to perform at the Lvov Festival or Virtuosi, and with the solo recital he gave there, he introduced the Ukranian public to his own compositions as well as to those of other contemporary Turkish composers.