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Olga Kern

Olga Kern has brought to stages around the world some of the mix of charisma and power cultivated by pianists of the old Russian school. She has amassed a large group of recordings on Harmonia Mundi and other labels. Born Olga Pushechnikova on April 23, 1975, in Moscow, U.S.S.R., Kern had a musical ancestry that her family traced back to the circles of Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky. Both of her parents were musicians, and after hearing her mother play Chopin, she took up the piano herself at the age of five. Glamorous and naturally gifted when it came to projecting stage presence, Kern showed a knack for winning competitions. She won her first one at 11 with a performance of Mendelssohn's music, and she decided on a musical career when she stepped in front of an audience as a piano soloist with an orchestra: "When I stepped on the stage, I felt so great," she told the Charlotte Observer. "I understood at that moment that I will never change professions.... This is how it must be. I must be performing." Kern's teachers in Moscow included Evgeny Timakin at the Moscow Central School and Sergei Dorensky at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. By the time she was 17, she was being sent abroad for competitions, and she eventually took home first prize at 11 of them, helped along the way by an honorary scholarship from Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996. The jewel in Kern's competition crown came in 2001 at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas, where she shared first prize with Stanislav Ioudenitch and thus became the first woman in the nearly 40-year history of the event to take the top prize. Kern also took her present surname in preparation for this event. She performed Liszt's Don Juan Fantasy, impressing judges with her sheer power and flair, and she launched her recording career on the Harmonia Mundi label with a fresh reading of the same work. Kern is noted for performing the real finger-busters of the keyboard repertory -- Rachmaninov, Liszt, and a range of lesser-known virtuoso Russian works. Her Cliburn victory launched her on a series of U.S. tours, and she made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2004 after a cancellation by another pianist freed up the hall. Kern seized the moment and earned rave reviews. She has also concertized extensively in her native Russia, Europe, and East Asia. Noted for her stamina, Kern has averaged some 150 concerts a year in the most demanding repertory the classical tradition has to offer. In February 2005, in South Africa, she performed all four Rachmaninov piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini three times over a span of six days, likely an unprecedented feat. Her other South African connections included a stint as artistic director of the Cape Town Summer Festival from 2006 to 2011, and she has often returned to perform there. Kern has spent increasing amounts of time in the U.S., establishing her own Olga Kern International Piano Competition in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2016 and joining the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music the following year. She has been much in demand internationally for master classes and prize juries. Leaving Harmonia Mundi in the late 2000s decade, Kern recorded an album of concertos by Shostakovich and Rachmaninov for Sony Classical in 2012. She moved to the Delos label in 2022, joining the Dalí Quartet for an album of piano quintets by Brahms and Shostakovich.
© James Manheim /TiVo

Diskografie

11 Album, -en • Geordnet nach Bestseller

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