Biography
She came to New York from Moscow with two goals: to study in America, and one day to play in Carnegie Hall.
Katya Grineva was born in Moscow and began studying the piano at six, at the Moscow Music School. She went on to the Moscow High School of Music, under the aegis of the prestigious Moscow Conservatory, where she studied with Professor Pavel Messner.
It was during her years with Messner that she began giving recitals, and found the thing that has shaped her playing ever since.
In Messner’s studio she first felt the “special and spontaneous” exchange between artist and audience that became the hallmark of her performances.
She arrived in New York in 1989, still a teenager. A scholarship took her straight into graduate study at the Mannes School of Music, where she worked with Nina Svetlanova, followed by private coaching with Vladja Mashke, who played a key part in her development as a young pianist.
She has lived most of her adult life in the city, and built a reputation there as a pianist of exceptional romantic and poetic expression.
Her American debut came in 1993, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat, K. 595, with the Baltimore Symphony. She made her Carnegie Hall debut on May 13, 1998.
She has been soloist with the Acadiana Symphony, the ARS Nova Musicians Chamber Orchestra, the Manhattan Virtuosi Orchestra and the European Philharmonic Orchestra in France. Her recitals have taken her to the Laurier Society in Paris and to Salle Gaveau, one of the most prestigious concert halls in that city. In New York she played Avery Fisher Hall with the Guayaquil Symphony Orchestra on November 16, 2005.
Her impact at the piano comes through subtlety rather than through force. Above all she values the beauty of tone, and stresses a suppleness and a natural approach to the keyboard.
The biography she has used for years gets closest to it in a single line: with Katya you sink into the sweet abyss of the music.
Despite a demanding concert schedule, she plays at private gatherings, often for the not-for-profit community, to raise awareness and funding for particular causes.
She founded Katya Concerts for Kids, which brings children who may never have heard classical music into the deep red chairs of Carnegie Hall and other concert halls, so they find out they belong there.
The record
9 recordings, from the complete Chopin nocturnes to the Bach cello sonatas.
Hear the recordings
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