Pianist and composer
Igor Raykhelson
For more than four decades he has built a body of work that moves fluently between classical music and jazz, two traditions he has never treated as separate.
Classical and jazz, side by side
Pianist and composer Igor Raykhelson has spent more than four decades building a body of work that moves fluently between the classical and jazz traditions. This fusion is rooted in his earliest training and sharpened over a career spent performing and recording alongside some of the most respected names in both worlds.
Born in Leningrad in 1961, he began piano at age five and was admitted to the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in 1976, where he studied classical and jazz piano side by side and formed his own jazz quartet, The Emerging Stars, which toured the Soviet Union to strong acclaim.
In 1979 his family emigrated to New York, where he continued his studies under the noted teacher Alexander Edelman.
That dual foundation has defined his work ever since. He has performed in jazz settings alongside musicians including Igor Butman, Eddie Gomez and Joe Locke, while maintaining an active career as a classical pianist in solo and chamber settings.
His most significant creative partnership has been with violist and conductor Yuri Bashmet, a collaboration that produced Raykhelson’s Jazz Suite for viola, saxophone, piano and orchestra, which epitomised and defined his crossover style. Bashmet has described him as possessing a rare command of both idioms, crediting him with elevating crossover composition above much of the genre.
“Igor Raykhelson possesses superb mastery of both classical and jazz languages. His music surpasses that of many composers working in the crossover genre.”
He continues to compose, perform and record, extending a body of work shaped by two musical traditions he has never treated as separate.
He lives in Italy with his wife and children. He is an American citizen.
Alongside music
For forty years he also worked in the titanium trade, where the company he founded in Switzerland, Interlink Metals & Chemicals AG (Fribourg, 1991), helped open the American market to Russian titanium in the 1990s. He holds an MBA from NYU’s Stern School.