Oberlin Conservatory of Music

Oberlin Piano Competition and Festival

Guest Faculty Biographies

Matti Raekallio

Matti Raekallio is a tenured professor at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland. Raekallio’s class includes several top prize winners, among them the First Prize laureates in Leeds, ASA Dublin, London, Vienna (Beethoven), New York (Artists International), and Budapest (Liszt-Bartók). He has been a juror in several international competitions, including Shanghai, Vienna (Beethoven), Tokyo (PTNA), the Selection Committee of the “Gilmore Artist” as well as the American Pianists’ Association Awards in the United States, and the Artur Rubinstein in Memoriam International Competition in Poland. His concerts and recordings, notably the three-CD set of the complete Prokofiev Piano Sonatas, for the Finnish Ondine label, have been widely praised. He has performed the complete Transcendental, Paganini, and Concert etudes by Liszt in a two-recital set. A central part of Raekallio’s solo repertoire is the cycle of the complete 32 Beethoven sonatas, which he has presented eight times altogether. In addition to his extensive solo repertoire, Raekallio has given performances of 62 piano concertos. These include all of Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev, as well as rarities like the concerti by Busoni, Szymanowski, and Lutoslawski.

Mykola Suk

Mykola Suk is assistant professor of music at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and has performed in solo recitals as well as soloist with major orchestras under leading conductors (most recently with the Russian National Symphony under Mikhail Pletnev), and at chamber music festivals throughout the former USSR, North America, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and Asia. Suk has recorded for the Melodya, Russian Disc, Hungaraton, Melda and Troppe Note/Cambria labels. He studied at the Kiev Special Music School and at the Moscow Conservatory with Lev Vlasenko. In 1971 he was awarded the first prize and gold medal at the International Liszt-Bartok Competition in Budapest. Suk has formerly been on the faculties of the Kiev and Moscow Conservatories, the New England Conservatory of Music, and Columbia University.