Alexandre Moutouzkine

The career of pianist Alexandre Moutouzkine, who emerged in 2017 not with a standard Beethoven-Brahms-Prokofiev recital, but with a delightfully varied album of all but unknown Cuban piano music, was international from an early age. He is denoted as Russian, but he actually was born in 1980 in Yoshkar-Ola in the Soviet Union's ethnically diverse Mari Republic. His first teacher was his mother. He studied in Nizhny Novgorod, but by 16 was taking advantage of new Russian freedoms and traveled as far as Argentina in search of prizes. A big one, a Jury Discretionary Award, came his way in the 11th Van Cliburn Competition in Texas in 2001. Moutouzkine grabbed the attention of the local Dallas Morning News with his performances of Brahms' Intermezzi, Op. 117. He studied with Vladimir Krainev at the Hochschule für Musik in Hannover and toured widely in Europe, Russia, and Latin America as a recitalist and in chamber music. Graduate education pushed Moutouzkine to a new level: he entered the Manhattan School of Music in 2003 and went on for master's, professional studies, and Artist Diploma degrees there over the next three years. His primary teacher was Solomon Mikowsky, a Cuban of Russian background, who had immigrated to the United States after winning a prize in 1956 and stayed on after the revolution. Russian pianists were well known in Cuba during the Fidel Castro era, but the orientation of Moutouzkine's first album, Piano Music of Cuba, came directly from Mikowsky. Connecticut's Greenwich Citizen raved after a Moutouzkine performance of Rachmaninov's technically brutal Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 30, that the pianist was "outperforming even the composer himself." The Cliburn Festival honor has been followed by a sequence of other prizes, including a first-place honor at the New Orleans Piano Competition in 2004. Moutouzkine joined the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music himself in 2013. He has arranged Stravinsky's Firebird Suite for solo piano and has performed the work as accompaniment to an animated film entitled Who Stole the Mona Lisa?
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