Oscar and Vera Knight Prize for HfMT students

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Olena Guilei, a cello student in Prof. Bernhard Gmelin's class, will be presented with this year's Oskar and Vera Ritter Foundation Prize, which is endowed with 15,000 euros, on November 7 in the small Laiszhalle. Following the award ceremony, the native Ukrainian will give a sample of her musical skills in a solo concert. The concert starts at 8 pm and admission is free.

For more than 50 years, the Oscar and Vera Ritter Foundation has been supporting and encouraging highly talented young artists in their musical development. The foundation's work focuses on young people who, for example, receive scholarships or can gain stage experience at concert performances. In addition to the prizes donated for numerous competitions in various categories, the annual RITTER PRIZE is awarded in recognition of particularly outstanding achievements by performers and composers.
Olena Guliei (*1989 in Kiev, Ukraine) first attended the National Music Academy of Ukraine Peter Tchaikovsky in Kiev and then moved to the Hamburg University of Music and Drama in 2012 to study with Prof. Bernhard Gmelin. She completed her concert exam there in 2014.
The young cellist received important musical impulses through master classes with Arto Noras and Niklas Schmidt, among others, as well as with Wolfgang Boettcher at the International Carl Flesch Academy in Baden-Baden.
She has won numerous prizes both as a soloist and as a chamber musician, including first prize at the cello competition in Lviv, Ukraine in 2008 and second prize at the Elise Meyer Foundation University Competition in Hamburg in 2013. Two years later, she and her duo partner Volodymyr Lavrynenko (piano) were awarded 1st prize and a special prize at the international "Premio Trio di Trieste" competition.
In the 2015/2016 season, Olena Guliei was a scholarship holder of the Orchestra Academy of the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg. She gained further orchestral experience as a member of the State Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine and the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra. From 2013 to 2015, the young cellist was sponsored by the Oscar and Vera Ritter Foundation, and since 2016 she has received a scholarship from Berenberg Bank.
As the winner of the 24th competition of the German Musical Instrument Fund, Olena Guliei has been playing a cello by Joseph Antonius Rocca (Turin, 1839), a fiduciary gift from the Jürgen and Monika Blankenburg Foundation, since February 2016.