Mikhail Pletnev

About Mikhail Pletnev

While not alone in being highly esteemed both as pianist and conductor, Mikhail Pletnev’s rare achievement is that he clinched his credentials from the outset of embarking on each discipline. In 1978, he won the top prize as pianist at the International Tchaikovsky Competition, and, in 1990, he made his conducting debut to extraordinary critical acclaim—albeit with the aid of the specially formed Russian National Orchestra, many of its elite players recruited from Moscow’s top orchestras. Born in Archangel, in what was then the Soviet Union, in 1957, Pletnev entered Moscow’s Central School of Music at 13 and went on to study piano at the Moscow Conservatory. Self-contained in manner, his greatest musical hero is Rachmaninoff, who excelled as both conductor and pianist and whose refined style of perfection Pletnev has made his own. Although Pletnev has performed and recorded works by Beethoven, Schubert, Scarlatti, and Liszt, Russian music remains at the core of his repertoire: besides Rachmaninoff, his recordings as a conductor include two complete cycles of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies; unorthodox but rhythmically well-sprung recordings of ballets such as Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, Prokofiev’s Cinderella, and Shchedrin’s Carmen Suite. Pletnev has also introduced to the West such lesser-known composers as Taneyev through his compelling recordings as pianist in the Piano Quintet (2003) and as conductor in the cantata At the Reading of a Psalm (2004).

HOMETOWN
Archangelsk, Russia
BORN
April 14, 1957
GENRE
Classical

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