Natalia Kouznetsova read musicology at the Astrakhan Conservatoire in southern Russia. After graduating she became senior music editor of the Astrakhan Region Philharmonic Society and lecturer in music in the Conservatoire. In 1990 she won a Fellowship by competitive examination to the Russian (Gnesin) Academy of Music in Moscow where her research was into the interaction between music and paintings.
Natalia has published and lectured extensively on classical music. However in the late 1990s she began composing music for the first time. Many pieces have been published by the on-line educational publisher Full Pitcher with her first printed album of piano pieces published in book form in 2010. Many individual songs by Natalia have been performed by schools and others in London in recent years.
Natalia is the founder and director of the North London Russian School of Music and Culture (www.northlondonrussianschool.com). She is also a teacher for the Haringey Music & Performing Arts Centre and is a former music teacher for Camden Council and music editor of London Courier (the oldest Russian-language newspaper published in the UK).
Natalia was appointed artistic director by the London Russian-Speaking Community Council, in partnership with the Russian Embassy, for a concert on 24 April 2010 to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the victory of the Second World War (when her new song To the heroes of the Second World War was performed ). A children’s choir, singing another of her songs, also opened the Russian spring Maslenitsa Festivals on the South Bank of the Thames at City Hall in 2009 and 2010 and on the children’s stage at the Trafalgar Square Maslenitsa event in 2011.
Other works by Natalia Kouznetsova include a musical Cleopatra, musical for children, Toy Shop, which was performed in an inner London school in 2006. She wrote a further children’s musical for the North London Russian School of Music and Culture illustrating Pushkin’s story of the Princes and Seven Knights as well as setting the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale The Emperor’s Clothes to music.
Natalia Kouznetsova’s music is original in both substance and style, however its main characteristics are expressive melody and tonality. Her work is firmly rooted in the tradition of the dramatic expression of poetry and art in music: formed in Russian music initially by Mussorgsky and later blossoming under Prokofiev with the assimilation of musical, visual, kinetic and verbal aesthetic expressions
