Piano Concerto No.1 / Francesca da Rimini.

"Kern's musicality radiates off the stage...and it is joyously alive, immediately communicative, fragrantly sensual" (Washington Post)

In June 2001, 26-year-old Olga Kern was awarded the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Gold Medal at the Eleventh Van Cliburn International Piano Competition - the first woman to have achieved this distinction in more than 30 years. Captivating fans and critics alike with her passionately confident musicianship and vivid stage presence, she was awarded two years of international concert engagements and career management, as well as a compact disc recording of her award-winning Cliburn competition performances for the harmonia mundi label.

Ms. Kern was born into a family of musicians (her great-great-grandmother was a friend of Tchaikovsky, and her great-grandmother sang with Rachmaninoff) and began studying piano at the age of five. Winner of the first Rachmaninoff International Piano Competition when she was seventeen, she is a laureate of eleven international competitions and has toured throughout her native Russia, Europe, and the United States, as well as in Japan, South Africa, and South Korea. The recipient of an honorary scholarship from the President of Russia in 1996, she is a member of Russia's International Academy of Arts.

She has performed in many of the world's most important venues, including the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, Symphony Hall in Osaka, La Scala in Milan, and the Salle Cortot in Paris; and has appeared as soloist with the Bolshoi Theater, Moscow Philharmonic, St. Petersburg Symphony, Russian National, China Symphony, Belgrade Philharmonic, La Scala Philharmonic, Torino Symphony, and Cape Town Symphony Orchestras.

As a result of her success at the Cliburn Competition, Ms. Kern made her Boston Pops debut during the summer of 2001 and performed at the Kennedy Center with noted soprano Renée Fleming in tribute to Van Cliburn in December 2001. Tours in the United States during the 2001-2002 season were highlighted by performances with the El Paso Symphony, Eugene Symphony, Moscow Chamber, Naples Philharmonic, and San Antonio Symphony Orchestras, as well as recitals in Atlanta, Boulder, Chicago (Ravinia), Los Angeles, New Orleans, Portland (OR), and San Juan (PR). Internationally, Ms. Kern performed in France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, and Russia, in addition to an extensive tour of South Africa in June of 2002.

The 2002-2003 season leads off with a performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra led by Christoph Eschenbach at the Ravinia Festival and appearances with the Columbus, Dallas, North Carolina, Syracuse, and Utah Symphony Orchestras, as well as with the Indianapolis and Moscow Chamber Orchestras. In recital, Ms. Kern will be heard at Bass Hall in Fort Worth; the Cerritos Center in Escondido, California; the Scottsdale Center for the Arts in Arizona; the University of Kansas Lied Center; and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; as well as in Milan, Montpellier, Ohrid (Macedonia), Zermatt (Switzerland), and Moscow. She has been invited to tour Germany in the fall of 2003 with the Moscow Philharmonic, and she will appear in recital at Carnegie Hall's new Zankel Hall in the spring of 2004.

Ms. Kern was featured in Playing on the Edge, the Peabody Award-winning documentary on the Eleventh Van Cliburn International Piano Competition which premiered on PBS stations across the United States beginning in the fall of 2001. She will also appear in the forthcoming PBS "Concerto" series which showcases her final round Cliburn Competition performances with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and Maestro James Conlon. She will record the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Rochester Philharmonic for harmonia mundi in October 2002.

She began her formal training with acclaimed teacher Evgeny Timakin at the Moscow Central School and continued with Sergei Dorensky at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where she was also a postgraduate student. She also studied with Boris Petrushansky at acclaimed Accademia Pianistica Incontri col Maestro in Imola, Italy. Ms. Kern currently lives in Moscow and devotes her free time to her four-year-old son, Vladislav.