Arcadi Arcadievich Volodos was born in Leningrad on 24 February 1972 to parents who were both singers, and began by training as a singer himself before turning to conducting at the Glinka Chapel School and the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He had played the piano from eight but only committed to it seriously at sixteen, on a teacher’s advice — he never worked systematically at scales and took poor marks for technique as a student. He trained at the Moscow Conservatory Music College with Galina Eguiazarova, then at the Paris Conservatoire with Jacques Rouvier and at the Reina Sofía School in Madrid with Dmitri Bashkirov. He holds French nationality and lives in Spain.

He has never entered an international competition; his career began when a Sony Classical manager heard him play informally at a friend’s house in the south of France and offered him a contract. The 1997 debut album Volodos: Piano Transcriptions — Horowitz, Liszt and his own concert paraphrases — took the German Record Critics’ Award and Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice, and he has since won Gramophone Awards for Live at Carnegie Hall in 1999, Volodos in Vienna in 2010, Volodos plays Mompou in 2014 and Volodos plays Brahms in 2018, along with the Echo Klassik as instrumentalist of 2003. Over two decades his repertoire has moved from transcription and display toward Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Mompou, and he rejects the virtuoso label, arguing that most technical difficulty is a by-product of unclear musical thinking.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadi_Volodos
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q631344