André Parfenov was born in Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, in 1972 to a German mother and a Russian father. His extraordinary musical talent, including improvisation on the piano, was discovered at an early age. When the family later moved to the distant city of Ufa, he was offered one of the rare and coveted places at a music grammar school. This later paved the way for him to study piano at the world-renowned Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow. For family reasons, the young pianist moved to Germany with his parents and siblings at the age of 22. He studied at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen and received his concert exam with honours in 2000. André Parfenov has already performed with many orchestras, including the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Brasov, the Lower Rhine Symphony Orchestra and the New Philharmonic Orchestra of Westphalia. Among the works he frequently performs are Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1, Rachmaninov’s Concerto No. 3, Beethoven’s Concerto No. 5, as well as George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Parfenov’s solo performances have been documented on four solo albums to date.

He has also increasingly expanded his compositional experiments, creating a highly acclaimed homage to Maurice Ravel for the left hand only and an independent finale for Johann Sebastian Bach’s unfinished Quadruple Fugue. 2015 saw the world premiere of a violin concerto composed by André Parfenov, which he dedicated to Vadim Repin.

André Parfenov’s universal musical abilities led to a permanent position at the Mönchengladbach/Krefeld theatre. As a composer and pianist with a wide range of experience, he has created music for all genres and productions and has written highly acclaimed ballet music for Robert North’s choreographies. In 2013, André Parfenov was honoured with the special prize for composition of the Ensemblia Mönchengladbach. In 2014, he received the Theatre Oscar from the Rheinische Post for his ballet music for Robert North’s choreography Verlorene Kinder. In 2013, André Parfenov received the title and medal Honoured Artist of Bashkiria from its president. Further ballet music for Chagall Fantasy and Pinocchio followed soon after. Elmar Lampson, composer and President of the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre, wrote in a letter about the Parfenov Duo’s first joint album: ‘I deeply admire the art of the composer André Parfenov, the richness of his imagination, the depth of his expression, his unbridled power. He continues the tradition of the composer-virtuoso’.

André Parfenov has also been a lecturer at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Leipzig University of Music since 2015. He met Iuliana Münch in 2009. Together they founded the Parfenov Duo and have since maintained an intensive artistic collaboration in the creation of new works and their presentation of unconventional concert programmes. Since then, André Parvenov’s passions have included writing music for the violin and thus ‘growing beyond the piano’ – as he describes it in his own words.