Elisaveta Blumina
The artistic director of the Hamburg Chamber Music Festival and the “Berliner Endeckungen” association is considered an outstanding representative of an entire generation of pianists, and not just since she was awarded the Echo Prize. The pianist Elisaveta Blumina is a multi-talent. As a child, she aspired to a career as a prima ballerina, learned to play the piano in the tradition of the great Heinrich Neuhaus and, at the same time, learned to paint. At the age of 12 she was accepted at the art school of the museum “Eremitage” and studied art history there for five years. Since her childhood, Elisaveta Blumina has associated tones and sounds with colours. When making music, she therefore always has colours in mind, and she experiences tonal harmonies or dissonances (like Scriabin and Messiaen…) as colours….
In the music world, this highly unusual artist is also appreciated as a gifted mediator. She has taught at the Hamburg Academy of Music and Theatre, at the Villa Musica, the Kronberg Academy or the Orchesterzentrum NRW and regularly gives master classes, for example at the Weikersheim Academy, Tel Aviv Univercity, Jerusalem Academy, the St. Petersburg Conservatory, in Cyprus, the School of Music in Cork or at the Tzfat Music Festival in Israel.
In the meantime, 35 CD’s have consolidated her reputation as an exceptional interpreter of the music of the 20th and 21st centuries as well. Her internationally acclaimed recordings of works by composers such as Nikolai Kapustin, Fazil Say, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovitch, Sofia Gubaidulina, Galina Ustvolskaya, Eric Sweeney, Giya Kancheli, Valentin Silvestrov, Grigori Frid and the Polish-Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, whose rediscovery Elisaveta Blumina has tirelessly championed, are proof of this. The labels “cpo” and “Capriccio” are currently producing a series of CDs with all of Weinberg’s piano works and also some chamber music works.
Elisaveta Blumina is a welcome guest at Carnegie Hall in New York, the Elbphilharmonie and the Hamburg Laeiszhalle, the Berlin Philharmonie, Auditorio Nacional in Madrid, St. Petersburg Philharmonie, Gasteig in Munich, Konzerthaus Berlin, Beethovenhalle Bonn, National Concert Hall Dublin as well as at festivals such as Verbier, Colmar, Lockenhaus or the Schleswig-Holstein Festival.
She regularly plays with many well-known orchestras, including the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra, St.Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, Aalborg Symphony Orchestra, Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, Sinfonia Varsovia, Staatskapelle Halle, RTE Orchestra in Dublin as well as the Moscow Virtuosi, under conductors such as Vladimir Jurowski, Yuri Temirkanov, Oliver Weder, Gabriel Bebeselea, Vladimir Spivakov or Thomas Sanderling. In 2022 she received an invitation from Chemnitz to conduct a project with the Robert Schumann Philharmonic Orchestra, which will soon be released on CD. When Elisaveta Blumina began painting a few years ago, it was initially a different form of music-making for her. While Blumina’s paintings were considered an insider tip in the beginning, they have since found their way to Nice, Boston, Hamburg, St. Petersburg, Cologne, Tel Aviv and Berlin. Solo exhibitions are held regularly. Music labels that (like Naxos) are also fascinated by Elisaveta Blumina’s painting like to use her paintings as covers for CD productions.