Biography (read more)
Yakov Vladimirovich Flier was born at Orekhovo-Zuyevo, east of Moscow, on 21 October 1912 (8 October, Old Style), taught himself at first and then studied with Sergei Korsakov. He entered the Central Music School of the Moscow Conservatory at eleven, working with Grigory Prokofiev and Sergey Kozlovsky, and moved up to the Conservatory itself in 1928 to study with Konstantin Igumnov, graduating in 1934 to a packed hall. He died in Moscow on 18 December 1977, aged sixty-five.
He won the All-Union Piano Competition in Leningrad in 1935, took first place at the Vienna International Piano Competition in 1936 ahead of Emil Gilels, and third at the Queen Elisabeth in 1938, becoming with Gilels one of the two leading Soviet pianists of his generation and their acknowledged rival. Illness ended his public concert-giving in 1949, though he returned to touring Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, playing Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto with the New York Philharmonic under Bernstein. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1937 and headed one of its piano departments from 1965; his pupils included Mikhail Pletnev, Bella Davidovich, Rodion Shchedrin, Viktoria Postnikova, Lev Vlassenko and Mikhail Rudy.
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