Italian pianist Vanessa Benelli Mosell began taking piano lessons at age 3, and at 7 she was enrolled in the International Piano Academy in Imola, where she studied with Franco Scala. In 2007, she moved to London to study at the Royal College of Music and worked with Dmitri Alexeev. She graduated in 2012. Benelli Mosell won the Elba Festival Prize and the first award of the Pietrasanta International Dance and Visual Arts Festival. She has toured China, North America, and South America, and performed in the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, England, Israel, Russia, and Turkey. She has been a soloist with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg, the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Symphony Orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna. She became a member of the Moscow Soloists in 2012, replacing Martha Argerich. Benelli Mosell was mentored by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and she gave a marathon performance of his works, as well as recording Klavierstück XII. Her repertoire also includes standard Romantic and modern works, and she has recorded music by Chopin, Liszt, Scriabin, Mussorgsky, Debussy, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, and Glass. She records for Decca, and is a Steinway Artist. ~ Blair Sanderson