Nastasya Khrushcheva is a Russian composer, pianist, musicologist, and playwright. She is a professor of the history of foreign music at the Rimsky-Korsakov St Petersburg Conservatory and holds the Candidate of Art Studies degree.
She graduated from the Rimsky-Korsakov St Petersburg Conservatory and completed postgraduate study there with Sergei Slonimsky; Nadezhda Degtyareva supervised her research. In 2014, she defended a dissertation on the interaction of music and literature in the work of Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, and James Joyce. She also trained in electronic music at the Chopin University of Music in Warsaw.
Khrushcheva won prizes at the international young composers’ competition I Am a Composer in 1999 and 2003, and in 2007 won a competition for the best romance setting of poems by Arseny Tarkovsky. She was a finalist in the Orpheus Radio composers’ competition in 2009. Her works have been performed in Sweden, Germany, Mexico, Poland, and England, and her chamber scores have been published by Periferia Sheet Music in Barcelona. In 2013–14 she was a resident composer of the St Petersburg Philharmonic, which commissioned two orchestral works: Beauty, three songs for voice and orchestra, and Slowly and Incorrectly for string orchestra.
She has written music for 25 dramatic productions, including works staged by Valery Fokin, Andrey Moguchy, and Viktor Ryzhakov. Since 2014, she has also worked with the independent theater TRU as a performer and co-writer, collaborating with director and playwright Alexander Artyomov. Their productions include Youth Is Alive and How to Find Your Love. Khrushcheva was nominated three times for the Golden Mask theater award, as a playwright with Artyomov and as a composer.
Her concert works include the violin concerto (2010), the monodrama Macbeth (2011; revised 2015), the bass-flute concerto Cakhes (2012), and the orchestral songs Beauty (2015). She also wrote the play A Pound of Flesh, presented at the Bolshoi Drama Theater in 2016 and based on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Her monograph Metamodernism in Music and Around It was published in 2020 and received the Andrei Bely Prize for humanities research in 2021. Khrushcheva received the St Petersburg Government Youth Prize in 2012 and the St Petersburg theater award Breakthrough in 2015.