Denis Leonidovich Matsuev was born on 11 June 1975 in Irkutsk, Siberia, the only child of two musicians; his father, a pianist and composer, was his first teacher. He studied in Irkutsk until the age of fifteen, and a prize from the New Names foundation in 1990 brought a stipend that allowed him to continue his training in Moscow. He moved there with his family in 1991 and studied at the Central Music School and then at the Moscow Conservatory with Aleksey Nasedkin and, from 1997, Sergei Dorensky. He took the Grand Prix at an international competition in Johannesburg in 1994 and won the Eleventh International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1998 at the age of twenty-three.

Matsuev built an international career on large-scale Russian Romantic repertoire, above all Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, and he also performs jazz. He founded and directs the “Stars on Baikal” festival in Irkutsk and the annual “Crescendo” festival, and has been artistic co-director of the Annecy Classic Festival in France; he was later involved with the Astana Piano Passion competition in Kazakhstan. He was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, received the Russian Order of Honour in 2018, and repeatedly won the Russian National Music Award as best classical instrumentalist. His public support for President Vladimir Putin led to concert cancellations in the West in 2022, and he has not performed there since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Matsuev