Jeni Zaharieva

Zaharieva took her degree at the Tchaikovsky Conservatoire in Moscow, studying with Vera Gornostayeva and Tatiana Nikolaeva, and worked afterwards in Paris with Pierre Sancan. A prize at the Robert Schumann competition in 1966 and another at the Marguerite Long in Paris opened a concert career that has run across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas in recital, chamber music and concerto, with Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin and the wider Romantic repertoire at its heart; a Chopin prize in Paris came as late as 2002. She taught piano and chamber music at the Pancho Vladigerov National Academy of Music in Sofia and has been a guest professor in Moscow, Paris, Brussels, Venice, Tokyo, Athens and New York. Two international competitions, Music and Earth and Albert Roussel, were her initiative, as were summer academies on the Black Sea coast. France made her an Officier des Arts et des Lettres; Japan awarded her the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, in 2018. Born in Sofia in 1946, she reached her eightieth birthday in January 2026. She gave the European premiere of Lalo Schifrin's concerto Americas with the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra under the composer, part of a Steinway Foundation project marking five hundred years since the discovery of America. At Branitz in Germany she was behind the restoration of Clara Schumann's pianoforte and performed on it and made its first recording after restoration, work for which the German government decorated her. Her summer academies began at Rusalka in 2001 and at Kamchia in 2016. The Japanese decoration was presented in Sofia on 25 January 2019.