Polina Fradkina performs as a solo pianist and a lector in Russia and abroad. She collaborates with modern composers, who write music especially for her. Polina also takes part in interntaional music festivals. Her audience varies from academic halls such as St. Petersburg State Academic Capella, Saint Petersburg Philharmonia, the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre and the Alexandrinsky Theatre, to art spaces and jazz clubs. She entered the top-twenty “St. Petersburg Avant-Garde”, according to Rosbalt information agency. Recordings and live streams of her concerts are being heard on radio and television. Polina has recorded and released five solo albums.
Polina prefers cross-cultural projects in her professional activity. Some of those projects are:
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an educational project “Metamusic” about the realtions between music and psychology;
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programs “Melancholy” and “Chopin and anti-Chopin”, where classical music meets video-art and sound design;
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a duet “In-Temporalis” with Cuban percussionist Yoel Gonzalez, which aims to unite classical and Afro-Cuban cultural traditions;
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a collaboration with a double bassist, Vladimir Volkov, and the AXE theater;
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a program about the connections between generations with Danish musicians: singer Gitta-Maria Sjoberg and cellist Tobias Van der Pals, etc.
“Metamusic” project
Last years Polina have been researching connections between music and psychology. She lectures, conducts seminars and master-classes.
The major themes:
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the evolution of consiousness in the context of music history;
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music and emotions (music as a tool for the development of emotional intelligence);
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music and the unconcious (the relationship between music and the psyche).
Polina teaches a course about musical language evolution. She also reads a course of lectures “How pictures sound” in the official Instagram account of the State Hermitage Museum. Besides, she gives lectures in the Jewish Museum of Tolerance, Museum of Anna Akhmatova, etc.
In the spring of 2021 she held a presentation at TED Talks: “On the role of dissonances in music and in life”.
She was born in a family of musicians. Her parents are famous musicologists and authors.
Her grandfather, I. Finkelstein, was a soviet composer, who worked as an assistant to D. Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatory.
Polina began her way as a musician at five. She graduated from the Musical Lyceum at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, then from the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where she also did postgraduate studies. Moreover, she graduated the Rubin Academy of Music of Tel Aviv University and the St. Petersburg Institute of Depth Psychology.
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“...Listening to the performance of Polina Fradkina, you experience deep satisfaction. This is exactly how we talk to each other, if our emotions are translated into a pure field of music. Fradkina is a deeply St. Petersburg’s musician, she surprisingly combines St. Petersburg’s traditions: the rigor of classicism, a penchant for refined artistic outrageousness, a stormy revolutionary temperament, a heightened sense of philosophical truth...”
Rosbalt Information agency
“... a very bright pianist, who is subject to a huge palette of performing techniques, a serious personality with a wide range and high culture”
“Petersburg-Classic” magazine