Pavel Nersesyan is a Soviet and Russian pianist, teacher, and professor at the Moscow Conservatory. He was born in 1964 in Ramenskoye, Moscow Region. From 1971 to 1982, he studied at the Central Music School in Yuri Levin’s piano class. At age nine, he gave his first public concert in Gorky, performing Bach’s Concerto in F minor with an orchestra.
After graduating from the Central Music School with a gold medal, Nersesyan entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1982, where he studied with Professor Sergei Dorensky. He completed the conservatory’s assistant-internship program from 1989 to 1991. In 1987, he began teaching as Dorensky’s assistant and working as an accompanist at Children’s Music School No. 60 in Moscow. He became an associate professor in 1997 and later a professor in the Moscow Conservatory’s special piano department. In 2012, he was invited to join Boston University as a professor, and he has taught in both Boston and Moscow.
Nersesyan has given master classes in cities including Dublin, Belgrade, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Tallinn, Almaty, and Seville. His concert appearances have taken him to venues in London, Paris, New York, Budapest, Seoul, Vienna, Tokyo, Osaka, Caracas, and other cities. His repertoire spans a wide range of piano music. He also appeared as pianist in productions of George Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial, set to Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto, and Jerome Robbins’s comic ballet The Concert.
His competition awards include prizes at the Beethoven Competition in Vienna in 1985, the Paloma O’Shea Competition in Santander in 1987, and the Tokyo competition in 1989. In 1991, he won first prize at the International Piano Competition in Dublin. He was named Honored Artist of Russia in 2005. Nersesyan has recorded works by Chopin, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Scriabin, and Shostakovich; the Moscow Conservatory released his recordings of Schumann’s Kreisleriana and Chopin’s 24 Preludes.