Biography (read more)
Viktoria Valentinovna Postnikova was born in Moscow on 12 January 1944 into a musical family. She entered the Central Music School of the Moscow Conservatory at the age of six, studying with E. B. Musaelian and later with Professor Yakov Flier, under whom she completed her studies in 1967.
She took an honourable mention at the International Chopin Piano Competition in 1965, and prizes at the Leeds International Piano Competition in England, the Vianna da Motta International Music Competition in Lisbon and the Fourth International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. In 1969 she married the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, with whom she performed and recorded until his death in June 2018; their son, Sasha Rozhdestvensky, is a violinist. She has worked throughout her career both as a soloist and as a collaborative pianist.
Postnikova’s discography is spread across Decca, Erato, Chandos and Melodiya, and its centre is Tchaikovsky: she recorded not only the complete piano concertos but the complete works for solo piano, a large body of music much of which is seldom heard in the concert hall. Beyond Tchaikovsky she has recorded Busoni, Janáček, Glinka, Brahms, Chopin, Prokofiev and Richard Strauss.
A great deal of that work was made with Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting. The partnership, which ran from their marriage in 1969 until his death in 2018, is the frame within which her recordings are usually discussed, and it is what made possible the complete-survey projects that dominate her catalogue and that account for the unusual breadth of repertoire she is associated with.
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