Quick Facts
Biography
Anna Kravtchenko (Ukrainian: Анна Кравченко; born 1976) is a Ukrainian classical pianist with an international career. She won the Busoni competition in 1992 and has been a piano teacher at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano from 2013.
Career
Originally from Kharkiv, Ukraine, Kravtchenko began learning piano at age five; she recalls "the great joy of being able to construct a phrase in a certain way and discovering unique sounds". She moved to Italy in 1995. She studied with Leonid Margarius from 1991 to 2000, first at the Kharkiv Conservatory, then in Italy at the Accademia Pianistica Internazionale in Imola.
In 1991, she won first prize at the international competition Concertino di Praga. A year later, at age 16, she won the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition, a competition whose first prize had not been awarded for the four previous years. She has since had an international concert career, and has recorded works by Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt for Decca.
Kravchenko performed Rachmaninov's Variations on a Theme of Paganini at the Berliner Philharmonie in 1994. In 1995, she toured Germany and Austria with the Israel Chamber Orchestra, playing Shostakovich's First Piano Concerto in Vienna in the hall of the Musikverein. In 2001, when she played Chopin's Piano Concerto in F minor with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Walter Weller, Geoffrey Norris of The Telegraph said she played it "in a way that thoroughly warmed the heart and thrilled the senses", and explained:
She incorporated Chopin's decorative writing into a vision of the concerto that had cohesion, vitality and fluency. The poetic reverie of the slow movement was set against the glistening roulades of the outer ones in a performance that, with justification, showed complete confidence in what it wanted to say, and knew how to express it eloquently.
Kravchenko won the International Web Concert Hall Competition in 2006. Since 2013, she has taught piano at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino.