Yakov Kasman was born on 24 February 1967 at Oryol, in the Russian republic of the Soviet Union. He took his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at the Moscow State Conservatory.

He won prizes at a run of international competitions in the first half of the 1990s: the Valentino Bucchi Competition in Rome and the London World Piano Competition, both in 1991, the Arthur Rubinstein International Competition in Tel Aviv in 1992, and the International Prokofiev Competition in St Petersburg in 1995. His American debut came in 1997, when he took the silver medal at the Tenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth. The two years of engagements that followed brought him to the United States, and a visit to Huntsville, Alabama, led in time to a permanent move with his family. He became an American citizen in 2006. He is Distinguished Professor of piano and artist-in-residence in the Department of Music at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he received the Ireland Prize for Scholarly Distinction in 2012.

Kasman is associated above all with the Russian twentieth century. His recording of the complete Prokofiev sonatas took the Grand Prix de la Nouvelle Académie du Disque in France in 1996, and his readings of Mussorgsky, Shostakovich and Schnittke have drawn particular notice. He has made some fifteen studio recordings for the Calliope label, with further releases through Harmonia Mundi.

As a concert artist he has appeared with more than seventy orchestras across the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and he works regularly as a chamber musician, the Manhattan, Parissi, Charleston, Shanghai, Tokyo and Talich quartets among his partners. He sits on competition juries and gives master classes internationally, and his post at Birmingham, held alongside a continuing performing career, has been the base for his teaching in the United States.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Kasman
https://www.uab.edu/cas/music/faculty-directory/yakov-kasman