VITA

The ECHO – Klassik award winner Olga Scheps was born in 1986 in Moscow, Russia. Her parents are originally from Ukraine. Since 1992, Olga has been living in Germany with her family. and she is now a German citizen.

She began studying the piano more intensively after her family moved to Germany in 1992. At an early age she had already developed her own unique style of keyboard playing, which combines intense emotiveness and powerful expressivity with extraordinary pianistic technique. Among those who discovered these talents was Alfred Brendel, who has encouraged the young pianist. A holder of scholarships from the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben and Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, she completed her studies with Professor Pavel Gililov in her adopted home of Cologne in 2013, passing her concert examination with distinction. She rounded out her training with Professor Arie Vardi and Professor Dmitri Bashkirov.

Besides the well-known works for piano, Olga Scheps’s repertory consists of compositions that are rarely heard in the concert hall, including the posthumous Études of Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt’s Malédiction, Olivier Messiaen’s Les Oiseaux exotiques, Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Concerto, Arvo Pärt’s Lamentate, and Mieczysław Weinberg’s Piano Quintet.

Her solo recitals are as popular with audiences all over the world as her acclaimed appearances as a soloist with orchestra and her chamber projects.

Renowned conductors such as Thomas Dausgaard, Lorin Maazel, José Serebrier, Marcus Bosch, Ralf Weikert, Michel Tabachnik, Antoni Wit, Ivor Bolton, Cristian Mandeal, Christoph Altstaedt, Tugan Sokhiev, Simone Young, Markus Poschner, Kristjan Järvi, Lena Lisa Wüstendörfer, Gabriel Feltz, and Pablo Heras-Casado have invited Olga Scheps to collaborate with them.

The pianist collaborates with renowned orchestras, including the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, the Munich Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Russian State Orchestra Moscow, the Staatskapelle Weimar, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, the Swiss Orchestra, the NDR Radiophilharmonie, the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, the Prague Philharmonia, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, the Braunschweig State Orchestra, the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, the Armenian National Philharmonic Orchestra and the Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla.

Olga Scheps performs with great success in world-renowned concert halls such as the Berlin Philharmonie, Elbphilharmonie, Cologne Philharmonie, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Vienna Konzerthaus, Tonhalle Zurich, Tonhalle Düsseldorf, Cadogan Hall London, and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. She is a sought-after guest at festivals including the Rheingau Music Festival, the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival, the Kissinger Sommer, the Heidelberg Spring Festival, the Ruhr Piano Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the MDR Music Summer, the Lucerne Festival on Piano, the ACHTBRÜCKEN Festival in Cologne, the Mozart Festival Würzburg, the Mersin Festival in Turkey, and the Menuhin Festival Gstaad.

A passionate chamber musician, she plays regularly with such artists as Alban Gerhardt, Daniel Hope, Adrian Brendel, Jan Vogler, Nils Mönkemeyer, the Danish String Quartet, the Danel Quartet and the Kuss Quartet, with which she recorded Mieczysław Weinberg’s Piano Quintet.

Since 2009 Olga Scheps has been an exclusive Sony Classical artist. Her debut album Chopin immediately won an ECHO Klassik award. The two recordings that followed, Russian Album (2010) and Schubert (2012), were also highly praised by the press. Her fourth Sony Classical CD was released early in 2014 and features Chopin’s Piano Concertos nos. 1 and 2 with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. The success of her solo-album Vocalise, published in 2015, was surpassed by her latest album Satie which Olga Scheps has recorded on the occasion of the French composer’s 150th birthday: It reached top 1 of the German classical music charts at first go. Her CD Tchaikovsky was released in October 2017, and she broke new ground with the album 100 % Scooter – Piano Only, on which she recorded arrangements of the most famous Scooter hits by Sven Helbig. In 2019, Olga Scheps’ album Melody featured repertoire ranging from Bach to Aphex Twin, tracing an arc across four centuries. A further release features her together with the Kuss Quartet performing the Weinberg Piano Quintet. On her 2021 album Family she combines works from the established classical canon with new piano arrangements of highly popular melodies and soundtracks as well as world premiere recordings of compositions by Schiller, Chilly Gonzales and by herself.

Since 2013 Olga has belonged to the select circle of official „Steinway Artists“