Olga Kern is a Russian pianist who lives in the United States. Born Olga Vladimirovna Pushechnikova in Moscow into a family of musicians, she began studying piano at the age of five with Yevgeny Timakin at the Central Music School of the Moscow State Conservatory. Her grandfather was an internationally known oboe professor, while her great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother were pianists associated with Sergei Rachmaninoff and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Kern gave her first concert in Moscow at the age of seven.
At eleven, she won the Concertino Prague International Youth Competition in Prague. At seventeen, she received first prize and the Grand Prix at the first Rachmaninoff International Competition in Moscow. From 1988 to 1994 she was a scholarship recipient of the New Names charitable foundation, through which she gave numerous concerts internationally, including appearances in Iceland and at the United Nations in New York.
Kern studied at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory with Professor Sergei Dorensky and completed postgraduate study there. She also studied in Imola, Italy, at the Incontri col Maestro Piano Academy with Professor Boris Petrushansky.
In June 2001, Kern became the first woman in thirty years to receive first prize and the gold medal at the eleventh Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas. Following the competition, she performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in honor of Van Cliburn. She appeared in the competition documentaries Playing on the Edge, They Came to Play, and The Cliburn: 50 Years of Gold; the 2003 documentary Olga's Journey was made about her after the Cliburn competition.
Her concert activity has taken her to major venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Hollywood Bowl, the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, the Great Hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonia, Royal Albert Hall, La Scala, Zurich Tonhalle, the Théâtre du Châtelet, the Rudolfinum, Cadogan Hall, Usher Hall, and the National Auditorium of Music in Madrid. In the United States she has performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Houston Symphony, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Nashville Symphony, and Dallas Symphony, and she has also appeared with orchestras and in recitals throughout Canada, Mexico, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
In Russia, Kern has performed with the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, the St. Petersburg Academic Symphony Orchestra, the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia, the Russian National Orchestra, the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, Moscow Virtuosi, and the State Chamber Orchestra. She is a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts. From 2006 to 2011, she served as artistic director of a summer festival in Cape Town, South Africa.
Kern has collaborated with conductors including Valery Gergiev, Leonard Slatkin, Vladimir Spivakov, Manfred Honeck, Christoph Eschenbach, James Conlon, Vasily Petrenko, Marin Alsop, and Jaap van Zweden. In 2013, marking the 140th anniversary of Rachmaninoff's birth, she toured a program comprising all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Leonard Slatkin and the National Orchestra of Lyon, later performing the same program with orchestras in South Africa, the United States, and Warsaw. Her chamber collaborators have included soprano Kathleen Battle, soprano Renée Fleming, the Takács Quartet, and cellist David Finckel.
In 2012 Kern and her brother, conductor, composer, and associate professor Vladimir Kern, founded the Aspiration charitable foundation to provide financial and artistic support to young musicians worldwide. In 2014 she opened the Van Cliburn Foundation's new hall in Fort Worth with solo recitals and became an exclusive Steinway & Sons artist. Her recordings include Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Balakirev releases for Harmonia Mundi, as well as Rachmaninoff's Cello Sonata with Sol Gabetta for Sony Classical. She received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 2017.