Rena Shereshevskaya, née Mustafabeyli, is a Russian and French virtuoso pianist and teacher. She was awarded the French title Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, received the Ippolitov-Ivanov International Prize in music pedagogy for outstanding contribution to the development of musical culture, and became an honorary professor of the Ippolitov-Ivanov State Musical Pedagogical Institute.
She was born in Baku and graduated from the Bulbul Special Music School for Gifted Children, where she studied in the class of L. Filatova. At the age of seventeen she entered the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory in the class of Professor Lev Vlasenko. After graduating, she continued her studies in the postgraduate program at the same conservatory and completed it with honors.
She began her career as a soloist of the Moscow and Baku philharmonic societies. However, because of an occupational hand injury, she devoted herself mainly to teaching. For twelve years she taught at the Central Music School attached to the Moscow Conservatory, and later she was invited to head the piano department at the Ippolitov-Ivanov State Musical Pedagogical Institute in Moscow.
After teaching at the summer academy of the International Colmar Festival in France, where she had been invited by the festival's artistic director Vladimir Spivakov, the Colmar National Conservatory invited her in 1993 as a visiting professor to organize a department for gifted children. Since then she has also worked at the Paris Higher National Conservatory, the Conservatory of Rueil-Malmaison, and the Alfred Cortot Higher School of Music in Paris, where she continues to work.
Shereshevskaya gives master classes in many countries, including France, the United States, Canada, Russia, Italy, Monaco, Germany, China, Sweden, and Switzerland, and is often invited to serve on the juries of international competitions. Her students perform in major halls such as Carnegie Hall in New York, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Salle Gaveau, the Philharmonie in Paris, the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, and the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.
Many of her students have become prizewinners at major international competitions. Among them are Alexandre Kantorow, who won first prize and the Grand Prix at the sixteenth International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 2019; Lucas Debargue, who won fourth prize and the Music Critics' Association Prize at the fifteenth International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 2015; Rémi Geniet, who won second prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 2013; Maroussia Gentet, who won first prize and five special prizes at the International Competition of Contemporary Music in Orléans in 2018; Julian Trevelyan, who won second prize, the prize for the best interpretation of a Mozart concerto, and the audience prize at the Géza Anda International Competition in Zurich in 2021; Dmitry Sin, a laureate of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 2021; and Alexander Klyuchko. Her first prizewinning student was Alexander Slobodyanik Jr., who in 1989 became the youngest winner of The Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York.
Alongside her intensive teaching activity, Shereshevskaya performs chamber music concerts with well-known musicians and also appears in a duo with her daughter, the mezzo-soprano Victoria Shereshevskaya. She is also the creator and artistic director of the festival Artistic Dynasties and Families.
In 2015 she was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France.
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