Elena Bashkirova

Elena Bashkirova is a Russian-Israeli classical pianist born in 1958 in Moscow. She began formal musical training at age 15 in her father Dmitri Bashkirov's class at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Bashkirova emigrated to Paris in 1978 and has performed as a soloist with ensembles including the Munich Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony, the Orchestre de Paris and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1998, she founded the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival and has served as its artistic director. Her recording history included Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, which received a 2017 International Classical Music Award, and Antonín Dvořák’s Poetic Tone Pictures (2020). In 2012, she established the Berlin-based sister festival Intonations. Bashkirova received the Ruhr Piano Festival Prize in 2018. Since 2020, she has served as the president of the Felix-Mendelssohn-Bartholdy-Stiftung in Leipzig.