Polina Pasztircsák (Pastirchak) was born into a family of applied artists in Budapest as a daughter of a Hungarian father and a Russian mother. She lives in Germany since 2010.

As a child she sang in a children’s choir and played the flute, however, she finished secondary school as a sales clerk in foreign trade in 2002. It was only this time, at the age of 19, that she returned to her music studies and started to take singing lessons from Júlia Bikfalvy at Etűd Conservatory in Budapest. During her music studies she graduated in cultural management at the West Hungarian University’s Teacher Training Faculty.

From 2005 to 2010 she became an apprentice of Mirella Freni at Centro Universale del Belcanto in Italy, obtaining an Italian-Hungarian interstate scholarship. Polina took on a postgraduate course at Conservatorio di Girolamo Frescobaldi in Ferrara, where she was granted diploma in the art of singing with outstanding results in 2010. She has improved her opera and concert repertoire by working together with maestros including Adrienne Csengery, Yevgeny Nesterenko, Bernadett Wiedemann, Carol Richardson-Smith and Edda Moser.

Polina’s singing performance was first awarded in 2004, when she won the first prize and the special prize of the Simándy József Singing Competition in Szeged, Hungary. In 2009 she received international recognition at the 64th Concours de Genève where she won the first prize together with the audience prize and two special prizes: the “Cercle du Grand Théâtre de Genève” and the “Coup de Coeur Breguet”. The latter prize made it possible to release her first portrait CD in 2010.

The Hungarian Radio and the Radio della Svizzera Italiana of Lugano keeps in their archives recordings of her performances. She made her first opera debut in 2007 in Modena in the opening night performance of “Le Piccole Storie” of Lorenzo Ferrero, the contemporary Italian composer. Later she made a great success on the very same opera stage casting as Micaela in Bizet’s “Carmen” conducted by Juraj Valcuha. She was first witnessed by the Hungarian audience starring Mimi in Puccini’s “La bohème” staged by Tamás Pál in the National Theatre of Szeged. In 2011 she debuted in Germany at the Handel Festival in Karlsruhe where she performed the title role in Handel’s “Partenope” under Michael Hofstetter’s baton to great critical acclaim.

As a concert singer she could be heard recently with the Orchestra della Radiotelevisione della Svizzera Italiana performing Shostakovich 14th Symphony, with the Liszt Ferenc Chamber Orchestra performing Mozart Concert Arias and at the Gran Théâtre de Genève singing Fauré's Requiem, as well as with the Sinfonia Varsovia performing Berlioz' Les nuits d'été (soprano version).

Upcoming engagements include several recitals in Switzerland, Germany and for Radio France Paris. Together with her pianists Boris Kusnezow and Jan Philip Schulze she will perform lieder by Strauss, Mahler, Zemlinsky, Mozart, besides Hungarian and Russion repertoire from Kodály, Bartók or Strawinsky. In 2013 she will return the Grand Théâtre de Genève to perform Woglinde in “Das Rheingold” und “Götterdämmerung ”.