VIKTORIA VASSILENKO graduated from the Lubomir Pipkov National School of Music in Sofia in the piano class of Antonina Boneva and Prof. Stella Dimitrova-Maistorova. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Music of New Bulgarian University. At the same time she graduated from the Queen Sofia College of Music in Madrid under prof. Dmitri Bashkirov and the Piano Academy Lago di Como in Italy. In 2019 he is completing his Master’s degree at the Academy of Music in Brussels under Prof. Boyan Vodenicharov. In 2021 she specialised at the Queen Elizabeth College of Music in Waterloo (Belgium) in the class of Prof. Louis Lortie and Avedis Kouyoumdjian.
She is a prize winner of many national and international competitions. She was awarded 1st prize at the George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest (Romania), winner of the Music Thursdays Piano Competition-Festival in Geneva (Switzerland).
As of 2020, she is a lecturer at the piano department of the Instrumental Faculty of the Prof. Pancho Vladigerov National Academy of Music. In 2021 she got her PhD in Musicology and Musical Art with the first large-scale thesis on “Mikhail Pletnev’s Piano Transcriptions of Ballets by Russian Composers – Aspects of Interpretation”. Starting in July 2019, she has been a guest lecturer in piano and chamber music at the Summer Music Academy and Musica Mundi Festival in Waterloo, Belgium. She has taught piano masterclasses at the Dobrin Petkov Music Institute as part of the International Music Festival Days of Music at Balabanov’s House in Plovdiv (2017), at the Conservatory of Music in Kluj – Romania as part of the George Enescu Festival (2020), at the Conservatory of Music in Jurmala, Latvia (2021).
Viktoria Vassilenko is the recipient of the Crystal Lyre Young Artist Award of the UBMTD for the 2007-2008 and 2011-2012 concert seasons. She was nominated by the listeners of the Bulgarian National Radio for Young Musician of the Year in 2009. In the same year, she became the winner of the Dimitar Berbatov Foundation’s Grand Prize for Excellence in the Arts. She was presented with the Golden Century Award for Young Musician for her contribution to culture and art in Bulgaria. In 2020, she was awarded the Golden Quill of the Ministry of Culture and Classic FM Radio. She is the first Chevalier of the National Award for Young Talent in Contemporary Art and Science of the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund” in 2021.
She has performed at renowned concert venues such as BOZAR, Flagey, Chateau du Lac, Ghent Opera House, Piano’s Maene (Belgium), Alte Oper (Frankfurt), Auditorio Nacional (Madrid) and Palau de Musica (Barcelona, Spain), Atheneum (Bucharest), Teatro de la Maestranza (Seville), NYUAD Art center (Abu-Dhabi), etc. As a featured soloist she has toured with the Brussels Chamber Orchestra, the Walloon Chamber Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Seville, the Lincolnwood Chamber Orchestra (USA), the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra, etc. as well as with the Biel Solothurn Symphony Orchestra, recording a CD (released by Fuga Libera) for the Mozart double concertos project with Louis Lortie in 2020.
She has played with renowned artists such as the Belcea Quartet, Augustin Dumay, Alexandre Rham, Jerome Pernod and others. She is part of the large-scale Ludwig van Beethoven/Ferenc Liszt Symphonies for solo piano project (Ruhr Klavierfestival, Germany; AMIATA Piano festival, Toscana; Dresden Festival etc.), a marathon of all Beethoven symphonies performed by pianists with international careers. In 2022 she became part of the organization and president of the jury of the first ProPiano Piano Competition and Academy in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.