Igor Parfenov

Curriculum vitae Igor Parfenov was born in Saint Petersburg in 1990. He started playing the piano at the age of 6 and studied at a music school until 2006. At the age of 16 he studied at the pre-college of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. In 2009 Igor Parfenov was accepted to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. During his studies he took part in various international competitions and festivals and was awarded several prizes. He played in the following competitions: the Chopin Competition in Estonia, the “Russian Piano Music on the Neva” competition in Saint Petersburg, “The Art of the 20th Century” in Finland and the Rachmaninoff Competition in Darmstadt. He attended master classes with Dmitriy Baschkirov, Sontruad Speidel, José Ribera, Pavel Egorov and Vladimir Mischuk, among others. In 2012/2013 and 2013/2014, Igor Parfenov was invited to concerts as a scholarship holder of the Werner Richard-Dr. Carl Dörken Foundation, both as a soloist and with orchestras such as the Sinfonietta Cologne, the Bergische Symphoniker and the Rheine Symphony Orchestra. These included performances at the “Summer, Castles, Virtuosos” festival. From October 2011, he studied in the “Bachelor of Music” program at the Cologne University of Music and Dance at the Wuppertal location under Prof. Josef Anton Scherrer. In May 2012, Igor Parfenov won first prize at the Steinway Competition for selected students from the universities of Essen, Düsseldorf and Cologne. In April 2014, he performed Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto with the university orchestra under the direction of Prof. Werner Dickel in the Historische Stadthalle Wuppertal. In 2023, Igor Parfenov received the Grand Prix at the Vivaldi International Music Competition. In 2023, he completed his master's degree with Prof. Lisa Eisner-Smirnova at the Robert Schuhmann University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf. In 2024, he inaugurated a new grand piano in the Historische Stadthalle with a solo concert.