Natalia Vlasenko is a Russian and Australian pianist and music teacher, the daughter of the pianist Lev Vlasenko. She was born on November 20, 1956, in Moscow, USSR, into a family that also included her mother Mikaella Krutatsovskaya, a teacher of English.
She studied at the Central Music School in the class of Eleonora Musaelyan, then continued at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory under Yakov Flier. After Flier's death, she completed her postgraduate studies in the class of her father, Professor Lev Vlasenko, who had himself been a student of Flier. After finishing postgraduate study, she became a soloist of the Moscow Philharmonic.
Vlasenko first gained wide recognition in 1977, when, as a twenty-year-old student of the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, she became a prize-winner at the International Beethoven Competition in Vienna. The distinction was especially notable because the competition was considered highly demanding and brought together about one hundred pianists. In 1985 she won another major international event, the Busoni International Competition in Bolzano, Italy.
Her teaching career began in Moscow at the Central Music School attached to the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. She later settled in Australia, where she combined concert activity with teaching at the Queensland Conservatorium of Griffith University in Brisbane, and became head of the piano department. Many of her students went on to win national and international competitions and to teach at conservatories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries.
In 1999, Natalia Vlasenko and Oleg Stepanov became founders and artistic directors of Australia's largest national competition, the Lev Vlasenko Piano Competition in Brisbane. Alongside her pedagogical work, she has performed extensively in Russia, the former republics of the USSR, Italy, Germany, Austria, Japan, New Zealand, China, Australia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
She has appeared with conductors including Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Karl Osterreicher, Karl Martin, Mikhail Pletnev, Vladimir Verbitsky, and Richard Hickox. Vlasenko also made recordings for Moscow radio and television and released compact discs in Russia and Australia.
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