Karen Kornienko

Karen Kornienko is a Russian pianist and composer-transcriber, born in 1974 in Astrakhan.

He graduated from a music school in Dnipropetrovsk. At the age of 15 he moved from Dnipropetrovsk to Moscow, where he entered the theoretical department of the Academic Music College attached to the Moscow Conservatory. In his second year he transferred to the piano department and graduated there in the class of G. N. Yegiazarova.

After finishing the college, in 1993 he became a student of the Moscow Conservatory, first studying with E. V. Malinin and later with V. V. Gornostaeva. From 1998 to 2000 he was a postgraduate assistant trainee at the Moscow Conservatory.

While still a conservatory student, Kornienko won third prize at the 1st International A. N. Scriabin Piano Competition in 1995. Two years later he received the Grand Prix at the 2nd International S. Rachmaninoff Piano Competition. He is also described as the winner of the 2nd International S. Rachmaninoff Competition in Moscow in 1997, a laureate of the 1st and 2nd International A. Scriabin Competitions in Nizhny Novgorod in 1995 and Moscow in 2000, and a laureate of the International Foundation "New Names".

Kornienko is a soloist of the Moscow State Academic Philharmonic. He has toured in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, and Kuwait.

An important part of his concert activity is devoted to his own piano transcriptions of classical symphonic works. Among his works are piano suites based on Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, as well as Lyadov's Three Fairy Pictures. He wrote the suite from The Nutcracker for Alina Korshunova, the young pianist daughter of his wife Veronika, but she died of cancer before she could perform it. Kornienko dedicated his first concert in the P. I. Tchaikovsky Concert Hall to her memory.

In 2011 Kornienko became one of the composer-transcribers invited to perform solo programs at the 4th International Festival "Piano Transcription: History and Modernity". His program included the suites Swan Lake and Three Fairy Pictures for Symphony Orchestra, as well as a fantasy on themes from Tchaikovsky's symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini, performed there for the first time.