Biography
Emerging in 2017, pianist Alexandre Moutouzkine bypassed the expected Beethoven-Brahms-Prokofiev program and instead issued a recording devoted to little-known Cuban piano works. His international activity had started far earlier. Frequently labeled Russian, he was in fact born in 1980 in Yoshkar-Ola inside the Soviet Union’s ethnically varied Mari Republic. His mother gave him his first lessons. After training in Nizhny Novgorod he took advantage, at sixteen, of newly available Russian liberties and ventured as far as Argentina to compete for prizes. A notable success came in 2001 when he received a Jury Discretionary Award at the eleventh Van Cliburn Competition in Texas. The Dallas Morning News singled out his readings of Brahms’ Intermezzi, Op. 117. He worked with Vladimir Krainev at the Hochschule für Musik in Hannover and appeared widely across Europe, Russia, and Latin America both in recital and in chamber music. Graduate study at the Manhattan School of Music, begun in 2003, brought further refinement; within three years he earned master’s, professional studies, and Artist Diploma degrees. His principal teacher, Solomon Mikowsky—a Cuban of Russian descent who had immigrated to the United States after winning a prize in 1956 and remained after the revolution—directly inspired the Cuban focus of Moutouzkine’s first album, Piano Music of Cuba. Russian pianists had been prominent in Cuba during the Fidel Castro period, yet the recording’s orientation stemmed from Mikowsky. After Moutouzkine played Rachmaninov’s technically formidable Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 30, the Greenwich Citizen declared that he was “outperforming even the composer himself.” Later distinctions followed the Cliburn honor, among them first prize at the 2004 New Orleans Piano Competition. He joined the Manhattan School of Music faculty in 2013. He also prepared a solo-piano version of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite and performed it with the animated film Who Stole the Mona Lisa?
Albums