Mykola Liubenko – cello

He was born in the city of Kryvyi Rih. At the age of five, he began violin lessons with Inna Valova, and later cello lessons with Elvira Zaitseva. He graduated from the Petro Stoliarskyi Specialized Music School in Odesa, where he studied with Viktor Moldavanov and Pavlo Kupin, and from the Odesa Music Academy (class of Valerii Kazakov).

In his second year, Mykola entered the private academy Kalaidos Hochschule (Switzerland), where he studied with the outstanding cellist Julius Berger, a student of Antonio Janigro, as well as Mstislav Rostropovich and Zara Nelsova.

Mykola Liubenko is an artist and, since 2023, has been the concertmaster of the cello group of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine under the direction of Volodymyr Sirenko. Since 2023, he has also been a soloist at the National House of Music.

In 2014, Mykola won the First Prize at the All-Ukrainian Cellist Competition in Lviv. In 2017, he gained experience in the orchestra of the Interlaken Classics Festival, performing on the same stage as Mischa Maisky and Alice Sarah Ott. In 2019, he took part in the Tsinandali International Music Festival, where he had the opportunity to work with conductors such as Gianandrea Noseda, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Lahav Shani, Claudio Vandelli, and soloists such as Misha Maisky, Denis Kozhukhin, Lahav Shani, and Yuja Wang.

In 2017 and 2021, at the invitation of violinist Andriy Murza, he participated in the Odesa International Violin Competition as a coordinator, dealing with the logistics of the contestants, their schedules, and other organizational issues.

As part of the collaboration between the Odesa Music Academy and the Detmold Music Academy (Germany), the musician is taking a course in sound engineering and applying his skills to create recordings of young musicians. He also creates video and photo projects at various concert venues in Ukraine.