Vladimir Ashkenazy

Russian pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy is one of the towering greats in classical music. In the concerto repertoire, his Rachmaninoff is among the best, as witnessed by the intense yet entirely natural-sounding ebb and flow of his Rachmaninoff No. 3 (1909), recorded in 1972 with André Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra. The same collaboration also produced compelling recordings of the Prokofiev concertos that revel in the playfulness and pianistic acrobatics of the composer's virtuosic showpieces. As a chamber musician, Ashkenazy has provided superlative accounts of Beethoven's violin sonatas with Itzhak Perlman—hear how the sparks fly in the Kreutzer Sonata (1803)—and of Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio in A Minor (1882), which Ashkenazy renders masterfully with Perlman and Lynn Harrell on their 1981 recording. Born in 1937 in what was then known as Gorky, to a pianist father and an actress mother, he entered the Moscow Central School of Music at the age of eight and began his studies at the Moscow Conservatory 10 year later, building up his repertoire of Mozart, Beethoven and Russian composers. He left the USSR permanently in 1963, initially moving to London, where he signed with Decca, for which he has recorded ever since. In the mid-'70s, he became active as a conductor, showing his power on the podium with early recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Symphonies Nos 4-6 with the Philharmonia Orche