Russian-German concert pianist Helena Buckmayer lives in Scotland where she enjoys her career as a performer and a piano lecturer.
As a soloist, recitalist and chamber musician, Helena has performed and toured through Germany, Switzerland, France, Britain, America, Canada and Japan whith several of the concerts being broadcast on televsion and radio. On numerous occasions, her playing has been described as "lyrical and poetic". Her mentor, Béla Síki, who himself was the assistant of the great Dinu Lipatti, described her as having rare sensitivity.
Born in Tajikistan, then part of the Soviet Union, Helena moved to Germany where she started piano lessons at the age of six. As a very young student, Helena was accepted at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart, Germany. One of her great teachers in Stuttgart was Fernande Kaeser, who herself was a Lipatti pupil and prodigee by Clara Haskil.
Her talent was noticed from an early age; she was just ten years old when she won her first piano competition. After the public concert one critic wrote "the audience was entranced by this little girl's natural touch". Following the first prize in the Yamaha Piano Competition and a special prize in the biggest German national competition, Jugend musiziert she received numerous awards and scholarships including substantial awards from the Cultural Institute for the Arts in Baden-Württemberg and the City of Ulm (both in Germany), the Johanneson International School of the Arts in Victoria (Canada) and the Manchester Music Festival in Vermont (USA).With Schumann's piano concerto, she won the International Festival Competition in Sewannee/USA where the jury praised her highly lyrical and natural feeling for Schumann's music. She finished her studying at the Royal College of Music in London.
Throughout that time, she has performed regularly within various concert series for young musicians. As a scholar she played and taught in both Canada and the USA. In recent years, she has worked and performed as a soloist with conductors such as Philip Jordan, Roberto Paternoster, Kenneth Kiesler and Robert Dick.
Among her chamber music partnerships, she has long-standing musical relationships with German flautist Karin Schweigart-Hilario, Icelandic violinist Palina Arnadottir, Russian cellist Anna Frolova-McCann and Armenian violinist Ani Batikian. She has recorded the piano quintets of Mozart and Beethoven, she has been involved in various film productions. Her playing was broadcast on radio in Germany, Japan and USA. She is one of the very few pianists playing Gideon Klein's Piano Sonata.
In 2010, she will dedicate herself mainly to her two most favourite composers, Chopin and Robert Schumann celebrating their bicentenary. Apart from their piano concertos, she will give various Schumann recitals. She is the founder and musical director of the Schumann festival in Edinburgh.It's Schumann's music which suits her very personal and unmistakable lyrical style best.
Helena has been privileged to have been taught by some of the finest teachers, Bernard Roberts (London), Béla Síki (Seattle), Leonard Hokanson and Gyorgy Sebok (both Bloomington, USA).
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