Having pursued a variety of activities with music at their core – concert pianist, organist, accompanist, impresario, author of a musical saga, etc. – Katherine Nikitine now devotes her time to piano performance and teaching.
Professor of Piano Didactics at the Haute École de Musique de Genève since 2021, she has also been Professor of Piano at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève since 2015.
She will be Dean of keyboard classes at the Geneva Conservatory of Music from 2019 to 2023, leading a team of 45 teachers of piano, harpsichord, organ and improvisation, serving 800 students. His achievements include the creation of several long-term projects: Kaleidoscope Week, the Piano Creation programme, the ‘Jouons!’ festival, which focuses on a different composer each year, and the ‘Ciné-Concerts’ partnership with Geneva’s Cinémas du Grütli. She is also responsible for promoting the harpsichord at the Conservatoire, highlighting women composers and inviting international artists such as Maria-Joao Pires and Elisabeth Leonskaja to concerts and masterclasses.
She has previously taught at a number of renowned CRRs, including Montpellier and Toulon, and has done a number of substitute teaching posts (Lyon, Saint-Maur, etc.).
She is regularly invited to teach masterclasses, mainly in France and Switzerland: Pôle Supérieur de Paris-Boulogne Billancourt, Cambristi Lemani, Fondation Hindemith, Institut Kodaly, Festival et Académie Musique à Beauregard, etc. She has also taught masterclasses in Germany (Stuttgart) and sub-Saharan Africa, and has given lectures on a musician’s career at the CNSMD in Lyon and on teaching at the Senzoku Gakuen College of Music in Tokyo.
She holds two Masters degrees (Piano and Pedagogy) from the CNSMD in Lyon, and her teachers include Igor Lazko, Jean-Claude Pennetier, François-René Duchable, Denis Pascal, Brigitte Bouthinon-Dumas and Georges Pludermarcher.
She has performed in concert on five continents, from Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris to MetLife Stadium in New York, as well as in Asia (China, Japan), New Zealand, several countries in sub-Saharan Africa where she has devoted her energies to numerous concerts and teaching (Congo, Gabon, Cameroon, Ethiopia), the Middle East (Turkey, Lebanon), the whole of Europe, Canada and the United States.
Her two previous albums on the Hortus label received critical acclaim (‘Fairy Tales’ piano and organ at the Auditorium National de Lyon, ‘Chant d’Adieux’ cello and piano, 5 Diapasons).
Her version of the Chopin Sonata with cellist Juliette Salmona was described by Jean-François Zygel as ‘one of the most convincing interpretations’ of the work (La Preuve Par Z, France Inter).
Some of the most emblematic highlights of her rich and varied career are perhaps her participation in the stadium tour supporting the German rock band Rammstein as part of the Duo Abélard (22 concerts totalling one million spectators) and her recording of the two Chopin Concertos with chamber orchestra in Stuttgart at the age of 27.
Since discovering Stephen Paulello’s piano making, Katherine Nikitine has recorded all her albums on her Opus 102 piano. She also had the privilege of being the first pianist to record an album on this piano. Her new album ‘Islamey’, released in January 2023, is devoted to the 19th-century composer Mili Balakirev.
