Our Team – Golden Key Festival

George Borisov, DMA, Ph.D.

George Borisov received his professional training in piano performance from the Rachmaninoff State Conservatory (B.A., M.A.) and the Glinka State Conservatory (D.M.A.) in the former Soviet Union/Russia, and has performed in solo and ensemble concerts throughout the former Soviet Union and the United States, as well as in Austria, France, Poland, Romania, Norway, and Indonesia. George has served regularly as an adjudicator for auditions at the NJMTA, MEA, SMEA, National Guild of Piano Teachers (USA), the Chopin International Piano Competition (Hartford, CT, USA), the Rosario Marciano Piano Competition (Vienna, Austria), Rome International Piano Competition (Rome, Italy), the Alberti International Piano Competition (Jakarta, Indonesia, Shanghai, China), the West Australian Pianist Competition (Perth, Australia), and others. He is the founder of the Golden Key International Music Festival in New York, Vienna, Barcelona, and Paris. George Borisov also received a Doctorate in Musicology (Ph.D.) from the All-Russian Institute of Musicology (Moscow, Russia) with a dissertation on the history of musical societies in southern Russia. He has published a variety of articles on musicological subjects in professional journals both in the United States and Russia. Dr. Borisov is author of the books From the Past of Kuban’s Culture (Krasnodar, Russia, 1989); Domenico Alberti and His Sonatas (New York, NY, USA 2007); From the Cradle of Classical Music (Freehold, NJ, USA 2013) For more than eight years he was the host and producer of the Russian television program “Lost Pages of our Culture,” which was devoted to the reanimation of the both the spiritual events and the names of the abandoned artists of pre-revolutionary Russia. Recently, his scientific interests are focused on researching the legacy of prominent Russian-American composers. He published a few articles on this topic and music album Vladimir Drozdoff, Selected Piano Miniatures (Sydney, Australia, 2018). He has been presenting the lecture-concerts on National European Television and at American Universities including Yale University, City University of New York, University of New Haven, and abroad at Ovidius University, Constanza, Romania; Tongji University, Shanghai, CHINA and others. Dr. Borisov holds an honorary professorial chair at Krasnodar State Institute of Culture, Krasnodar, Russia.

Jim Manganaro, Ph.D.

Jim Manganaro is a chemical engineer having worked for 30 years at FMC Corp.’s R&D Center in Princeton. He received undergraduate degrees from MIT and a PhD from Rensselaer. He taught at Manhattan College for several years. He has retained a lifelong interest in music and in particular piano music, having received piano lessons as an adult for 5 years. He is greatly indebted to his music teachers for a truly priceless experience.He is currently consulting on biofuels at Stevens Institute of Technology and gaining background by auditing courses at Princeton University mainly on biology topics.

Layla Akhmetova, MA

Ms. Layla Akhmetova was born in Kazakhstan. She began violin lessons at the age of eight and studied at the Kazakh National Academy of Music. She continued her studies at the Hanns Eisler Hochschule für Musik in Berlin with Professor Saschko Gawriloff and completed her MA degree at the Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität der Stadt Wien with Professor Dalibor Karvay.

Layla has won several international competitions. As an orchestral musician, she served as the second principal violinist of the Berlin Residence Orchestra and was a member of the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra in Bratislava. She also performed with the trio “The Saxophone Connections” (violin, cello, and alto saxophone), which released its first CD in Bratislava in May 2022.

Ms. Akhmetova frequently performs solo and ensemble recitals in many prestigious European and American venues, including Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.