She spent her childhood and youth at the Arctic Circle, looking out of the window at the frozen sea of the far North with its clear air and slabs of ice that seemed chiselled by winter and enjoying the magical colours of the tundra in summer. It was a life that shaped her pianistic sense of clarity, of architecture, of colour, and led her to a sensitivity bordering on shyness and a wealth of profound emotion.

​

Ekaterina was born in 1986 in Magadan (Russia) and began playing the piano when she was four years old. She received her early musical education between 1994 and 2001 at the Children’s Music School in Anadyr, capital of the autonomous region of Chukotka. Her first piano lessons gave clear priority to sensitivity and expression over technique, and that circumstance can be seen as a stroke of luck for Ekaterina’s subsequent development. When Ekaterina was 15, the family moved to Moscow.

 

Ekaterina studied from 2002 to 2006 at the State Chopin Music School in the piano class of Irina Gabrielova and was awarded her diploma with distinction. From September 2006 she was enrolled in the Maimonides Classical Piano Academy in the piano classes of Viktor Derevyanko, Alexander Mndoyants and Ekaterina Derzhavina. In November 2011, she commenced studies of artistic instrumental training with piano as main subject at the College of Music and Dance in Cologne, attending the piano class of Nina Tichman, and graduated Master of Music with distinction in July 2013. In 2014 she moved to the College of Music in Würzburg in order to study in the masterclass of Bernd Glemser.

​

Ekaterina Litvintseva was particularly influenced by her lessons with Robert Kulek, Rudolf Kehrer and Andrzej Jasinski. During the summers of 2007 and 2008 she took part in the Tel-Hai International Piano Master Classes at Sde Boker in Israel and studied with D. Bashkirov, N. Petrov, V. Derevyanko, E. Krasovsky, J. Rose, J. Ribera, A. Goldstein and others.

​

Ekaterina Litvintseva was awarded a series of diplomas from 1996 and has won numerous prizes, starting at the age of 10 at the Young Talents of Chukotka competition in Anadyr, adding to her tally in 2008 in the competition held at the Tel-Hai International Piano Master Classes at Sde Boker in Israel, and emerging most recently as the winner of the Concorso Internationale per Pianoforte e Orchestra "Città di Cantù" in the section "Classical Piano Concertos" for her interpretation of the Concerto in A major K414 by W.A. Mozart and as laureate of the "Concours International de Piano Son Altesse Royale la Princesse Lalla Meryem" in Morocco.

​

Ekaterina has played with such ensembles as the Moscow Chamber Orchestra of the Slobodkin Theatre and Concert Centre under the direction of L. Nikolaev, the State Academic Chamber Orchestra of Russia under the direction of K. Orbelian, the Symphony Orchestra of the Chopin Music School (conductor V. Ryzhaev), the Student Orchestra of the Maimonides Classical Piano Academy (conductor V. Kern), the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Vag Papian, the Arad State Philharmonic (Romania) under the direction of Dorin Frandes, the Banat State Philharmonic in Timisoara under the direction of Horst-Hans Bäcker, the Filarmonica Mihail Jora Bacau under the direction of Ovidiu Balan and the Klassische Philharmonie Bonn under the direction of Heribert Beissel, with whom in November 2012 she played in some of Germany's best known venues such as Berlin’s Konzerthaus, the Liederhalle in Stuttgart, the Beethovenhalle in Bonn, the Meistersingerhalle in Nürnberg, the NDR Funkhaus in Hanover and the Hamburg Musikhalle.

​

The concert in the Rudolf-Oetker-Halle in Bielefeld prompted the following comment from the Neue Westfälische newspaper on November 19, 2012: “The work that we know as the ‘Jeunehomme’ Concerto, his early E flat major masterpiece K271, was actually written by Mozart for a touring virtuoso named Jenamy.

 

The equally young Ekaterina Litvintseva brings formidable resources to the part and is masterful in her often unconventional interplay with a very well prepared orchestra. What that means is: unruffled clarity of formulation (even in the accompanying hand) in the singing Allegro; vigour, eloquence and staying power in the expressively depicted lyricism of the minor-key middle movement and perfectly executed Presto propulsiveness in the no less imaginative twists and turns of the virtuoso finale. With Chopin’s C sharp minor Scherzo as an encore, a blend of powerful emphasis and glittering cascades, the young Russian showed just what she was capable of.”

​

Ekaterina has a predilection for W.A. Mozart, whose piano concertos K271 and K414 she recorded live for a CD in November 2013 together with the Klassische Philharmonie Bonn under the baton of Heribert Beissel (Profil PH 14047), and for the piano works of Serge Rachmaninov whose early piano works she recorded in January 2014 in cooperation with the “Saarländischer Rundfunk”) (Profil PH 14042). Further radio recordings include piano works by Wilhelm Furtwängler.