Dr Maria Razumovskaya will be working to support your musical journeys as Director of Performance & Performance Studies at the Music Faculty this year. Coaching, workshops, seminars and lectures will support your engagement with performance as an interdisciplinary lens through which the music performed and analysed becomes a tool with which to critically explore the creative, cultural, social, and political worlds. Together through your own and shared public-performance projects (including with the Director of Performance & Performance Studies, and invited guests) we will engage with performance as critique of the world-making power of performance through questions of embodiment, action, behaviour, and agency in the intercultural domain. This field of performance studies will enrich your identities as creative artists, and hopefully give you support to carve out a personal territory of where you want your musical creativity to sit in the context of today’s society.
She brings an international profile as an active pianist (solo, collaborative and radio/TV broadcast), published researcher (practice-as-research, performance studies and musicology), and teacher (professor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama). Her specialist interests includes identity-creation through performance, interactions of Soviet and post-Soviet performance practice and socio-cultural histories, and practice-as-research.
Razumovskaya has been described as a ‘virtuoso story-teller of the piano’ (Le Courrier). She performs at many major international festivals and venues including the Cheltenham Festival, Wigmore Hall, St John’s Smith Square, Cadogan Hall, Holywell Room, SJE Arts Piano International Series, Lavaux Classique, Zurich Stadt Kultur, Piano City Milan, Paris Musée d’Orsay, Yogyakarta Philharmonia, the Saint Petersburg Philharmonia, and the Rachmaninov Hall and Skryabin Museum in Moscow.
Razumovskaya's live performances have been recorded and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and featured as highlights in their ‘Performing Miracles’ series, RTS, Espace 2, Radio Orfeo, and ABC Radio.
Razumovskaya's debut-disc recorded by Tony Faulkner on the Malachite label was shortlisted for the Liszt Disque Grand Prix, and subsequent recordings for the label have been singled out by international publications such as Pizzicato magazine, and critically praised for the performance’s ‘extraordinary mastery’ [American Record Guide] and ‘staggering passion and lyricism’ [Gramophone]. Further recordings including the works of Busoni, Liszt, CPE Bach and Rachmaninov; Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky.
Chamber music partners include Faina Lushtak, Ilan Schneider, Wolfram Christ, the Alban Berg Quartet, principals of the Berlin Philharmonic, Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Luxembourg Philharmonia, Basel Philharmonic, National Opera Orchestra of Paris, and soloists of the Mariinsky Opera, Bolshoi Opera, and Metropolitan Opera. As a faculty and guest artist at international summer schools she has played recitals alongside artists including Nikolai Lugansky, Marc Andre Hamelin, and Piotr Andrezewski; and premiered works by composers including Philippe Hersant.
She is passionate about encouraging academic and broader audiences to share in her curiosity for the stories behind the music and its makers. Razumovskaya's writings include a monograph on the legendary pianist and pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus (Boydell & Brewer). This was awarded CHOICE Outstanding Title. She has also written book chapters (Indiana University Press, Palgrave Macmillan), articles for academic journal, and the wider press.
She is a professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, guest faculty at several international music academies and festivals, and an external examiner for several institutions.
