Biography (read more)
Andrei Gavrilov was born on 21 September 1955 in Moscow. His father Vladimir Gavrilov was a painter of German descent; his mother Assanetta Eguiserian was an Armenian pianist who gave him his first lessons at the age of two. He entered the Moscow Central Music School in 1961 under Tatyana Kestner and later studied with Lev Naumov at the Moscow Conservatory, completing his formal studies around 1979.
He won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1974, at eighteen and after a single semester at the conservatory, and in the same year came to wider notice by substituting for Sviatoslav Richter at the Salzburg Festival. In December 1979 he failed to appear for scheduled Rachmaninoff sessions with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic: the Soviet authorities, responding to his political criticism, had seized his passport and travel documents. He remained restricted until 1984, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s intervention secured his release. He lived briefly in London, moved to Bad Camberg in Germany in 1989 and took German citizenship, then to Lucerne in 2001 and to the canton of Zürich in 2008.
Gavrilov’s recorded work divides cleanly across three labels and three phases: Melodiya before 1977, EMI from 1977 to 1989 and Deutsche Grammophon from 1991 to 1993, with a discography centred on Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Prokofiev and Bach. The Tchaikovsky Competition win and the Salzburg substitution for Richter fell in the same year, and together they made him one of the most conspicuous Soviet pianists of his generation before he was twenty.
His career is also a study in what that system could do to a player. The confiscation of his documents in 1979 removed him from Western concert life for five years at exactly the point when it was opening to him. After announcing his retirement in 1993 he took an eight-year sabbatical given over to artistic and spiritual study, including time in Fiji, returning to the concert platform in 2001 and to the recording studio in 2014.
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