Pieces for violoncello and piano

Olga Ponomareva was born in 1986 in Volgograd into a family of choristers and choir directors.

Since 1994 she studied cello and piano at a special music school at the Volgograd State Conservatory named after Pavel Serebryakov. In 2006 she entered the Gnessin Academy of Music in the class of Professor Boris Talalay.

Since the age of 10, Olga has been active in concert activities and is a laureate of All-Russian and International

competitions. She repeatedly performed as a soloist with the Volgograd Symphony Orchestra. In 2002 she became

a scholarship holder of the fund of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. She became seriously interested in composition in her last year at the Academy and regularly attended master classes at the New Music Studio at the Moscow Conservatory. The debut as a composer-performer took place in the fifth year of the Academy, where Olga performed Three Pieces for Cello Solo. And in 2012 she performed Three Pieces at the International Festival in Hungary. In 2014 she took a composition course at the Vienna University of Music, in 2018 at the New Classics school of composers at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Olga has works not only for cello, but also for choir, piano, quintet, she writes songs, electronic music and tracks for short films.

Olga Ponomareva has also been teaching since 2004. Since 2021, she began teaching cello at the Institut

Montana Zugerberg (Switzerland). In 2015 Olga founded the project ol.cello (YouTube, SoundCloud) in which she performs classical, modern and her original music.

Pieces for cello in this collection are written in the neoclassical style.

Nostalgia was written in February 2021, inspired by memories of Moscow.

Cry was written in 2020 during the lockdown and quarantine in Switzerland.

Simple Happiness for cello solo was written in 2018 and has the mood of home music playing by the fireplace.