The Russian pianist and composer Irina Emeliantseva was born in 1973 in Seltso (Bryansk), where she completed her preliminary studies in piano at the local music school (1988–92) and won a prize for the best performance of Prokofiev. From 1992 to 1997 she studied Piano with N. Eismont and Composition with S. Slonimsky at the Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory in St Petersburg, after which she became an assistant in Professor Slonimsky’s composition class. From 1996 to 1999 she attended international master classes in Germany, Russia and Ukraine. She has given many world premières and first Russian performances of works inter alia by Dittrich, Messiaen, Roslavets, Lutoslawski, and Humel as well as her own music. As a pianist she sees her main objective in the dissemination of contemporary piano music.
In 1995 Emeliantseva won the Gartov Foundation Prize for young composers in Germany, and in 1996 the composition prize at the Sound Ways Festival in St Petersburg. From 1999 to 2001 she pursued her studies on a German Academic Exchange Scholarship with Paul-Heinz Dittrich at the ‘Hanns Eisler’ Academy of Music, Berlin, and attended the ‘Rheinsberg’ Academy of Music on a scholarship from the Berlin Senate (2000). Later, in 2002–3, she studied composition with Hanspeter Kyburz in Berlin and Ernst Helmuth Flammer in Dresden; she also received a post-graduate fellowship at the Berlin University of the Arts (2002–3) and a grant-in-aid at the ‘Lukas’ Art House in Ahrenshoop (2002). In 2004 she completed an advanced degree in composition with Ernst Helmuth Flammer at the ‘Carl Maria von Weber’ Academy in Dresden, where she was awarded a scholarship in 2005. In 2007 she attended the Schreyahn Artists Retreat on a scholarship from the Science and Culture Ministry of Lower Saxony. She has received commissions for new works from the Berlin Senate’s Office of Science, Research and Culture and from the young.euro.classic festival at the European Summer of Music, Berlin.
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