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Viktoria Postnikova

About this Artist

Born into a family of musicians, pianist VIKTORIA POSTNIKOVA entered the Moscow Central Music School at the age of six, studied with E. B. Musaelian, and made her public debut at the age of seven with a Mozart concerto. At the Moscow Conservatory she joined the class of Jakob Flier. While still a student, she won prizes at the Warsaw, Lisbon, Leeds, and Tchaikovsky competitions.

Her repertoire is extremely broad, covering works by composers such as Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Liszt, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and Rachmaninoff and from more contemporary periods, such as music by Busoni, Ives, Britten, Shostakovich, and Schnittke.

Postnikova has performed with many conductors, including Adrian Boult, Kurt Masur, Kirill Kondrashin, Colin Davis, and her husband, Gennady Rozhdestvensky. Among the many orchestras she has worked with in Europe are the Berlin Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw, and the London orchestras. In America she has worked with the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, and the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras. In addition to numerous tours to Europe and Japan, she has appeared with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in South America and with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Australia and the Far East.

She has made appearances in recent seasons with the Orchestra of the RAI Turin, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Teatro Carlo Felice Genoa, Santa Cecilia Rome, the BBC Scottish Symphony, the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestra of the Teatro San Carlo Naples, and the Oslo Philharmonic.

She has recorded all three of Tchaikovsky’s piano concertos for Decca, the Busoni Piano Concerto as well as the complete piano music of Tchaikovsky, Janačék, and Glinka for Erato, violin sonatas by Strauss and Busoni for Chandos, and the complete piano concertos of Brahms, Chopin, and Prokofiev, among many other recordings, for Melodiya.

In 2004 Postnikova was awarded the Russian “People’s Artist Award.” She is also an accomplished chamber musician, having given concerts with Yehudi Menuhin featuring the complete Brahms violin and piano sonatas along with sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven, and Bartók.