Biography (read more)
Mikhail Vasilievich Pletnev was born in Arkhangelsk on 14 April 1957 to a bayan-teacher father and a pianist mother. After six years with Kira Shashkina in Kazan he entered the Moscow Central Music School at thirteen under Evgeny Timakin — Ivo Pogorelić a classmate and lasting friend — then the Moscow Conservatory under Yakov Flier and Lev Vlassenko. Gold medal at the 1978 Tchaikovsky Competition at twenty-one, he later founded the Russian National Orchestra, dividing his life between the keyboard, the podium and composition.
Pletnev’s pianism descends from the Russian line of Flier while sounding like nobody else: orchestral in colour, willful in tempo, and at its most personal in Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and his own transcriptions of the Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty. For a listener comparing performances, he is reliably the reading that refuses the consensus — which makes him one of the most instructive pianists to hear against any other.
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