Piano Recital “Young Virtuosos”

About the event

Three rising young artists from Germany and Ukraine shape this evening with a varied programme of classical and romantic piano works.

KHRYSTYNA MYKHAILICHENKO, born in Simferopol/Crimea in 2005, received her first piano lessons at the age of four. From the age of five she took part in several national competitions in Crimea, winning most of them. For five years she studied at the Rachmaninov State School of Music in the class of Svetlana Novitskaya. She made her first appearance with orchestra at the age of eight in Simferopol.

In 2014, after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, the Mykhailichenko family moved to Kyiv, where Khrystyna passed the entrance examination for the State Music Lyceum and joined the class of Prof. Nataliia Tolpygo-Rusina. In 2014/15 she won the International Piano Competition in The Hague, followed by a tour of France and Belgium (Salle Cortot, BOZAR Brussels, the conservatories of Antwerp and Bruges).

In March 2016 Prof. Alexei Grynyuk took over her further training. His verdict: “Khrystyna's talent is deeper and more powerful than any other I have been able to work with so far.” She has won first prizes at “Chords of Khortytsia” (Ukraine), “Merci Maestro” Brussels and the Vladimir Horowitz Competition in Kyiv, among others. By the age of eleven she had already given more than 40 performances. After the Russian invasion in 2022 the family first moved to Poland, then to Dresden and the United Kingdom. She continues her studies at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.

ARMAN DEPPERSCHMIDT was born in Bayreuth in 2005 and has studied since 2018 as a junior student in the piano class of Prof. Michael Wessel at the University of Protestant Church Music in Bayreuth. He has taken part in masterclasses at the Academy of Music in Kraków (Prof. Andrzej Pikul, Prof. Michael Wessel) and at Haus Marteau (Prof. Wolfgang Manz, Prof. Christoph Sischka), with private lessons from Prof. Gesa Lücker (Cologne), Prof. Gerlinde Otto (Weimar) and Christian Thielemann (summer 2021). He has won several first prizes at “Jugend musiziert” as a soloist and chamber musician; his first major solo recital took place in 2021 in the Steingraeber chamber music hall in Bayreuth.

SOFIIA ZAKHAROVA was born in Kharkiv/Ukraine in 2005 and began playing the piano at the age of five. She studied at the Lyceum of Arts in Kharkiv and simultaneously at the Lysenko Music School, later at the Lyatoshinsky Music College. Shortly after the outbreak of war in 2022 the family sought refuge in Germany, first in Darmstadt, then in Dresden, where Sofiia is mentored by Prof. Aleksandra Mikulska. In Ukraine she took part in 42 national and regional piano competitions with top placings, including the International F. Chopin Competition in Dnipro and the “Chopin's Spring” competition in Lutsk in 2019.

Biographies