Alexei Kornienko

A pianist of the Russian school who found his second career, and his home, in Carinthia. Alexei Kornienko was born in Moscow on 5 May 1954, studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Yakov Zak's piano class and conducting in Kharkiv with Vakhtang Jordania, and took a prize at the first All-Union Rachmaninov Competition. In 1990 he moved to Austria, where he has taught piano, chamber music and conducting at the Carinthian State Conservatory in Klagenfurt and co-founded the chamber orchestra Collegium Musicum Carinthia and the Gustav Mahler Ensemble. With his wife, the violinist Elena Denisova, he built the WoertherSee Classics Festival on a simple premise: Mahler, Brahms, Berg, Webern and Wolf all spent time on that lake or in that province. He has been its artistic director since its founding in 2002 and is chief conductor of its festival orchestra, Capella Mahleriana. For a period he was chief conductor of the Sofia Philharmonic. With Denisova he has also worked at recovering neglected chamber music of the Classical and Romantic period; their Gramola disc Vienna 1900 brought together pieces by Robert Fuchs, Pavel Singer and Zemlinsky. He sits on competition juries and belongs to the Bösendorfer Artistic Club.