Biography (read more)
Vladimir Davidovich Ashkenazy was born on 6 July 1937 in Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, to a pianist father and an actress mother. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Lev Oborin, took second prize at the 1955 Chopin Competition in Warsaw, won the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 1956, and shared first prize at the 1962 International Tchaikovsky Competition with John Ogdon. He left the Soviet Union in 1963, living first in London, then in Iceland, whose citizenship he took in 1972, and later in Switzerland. He withdrew from public performance in 2020.
Ashkenazy is among the most extensively recorded pianists of the LP and CD eras, with near-complete cycles of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven and Scriabin made for Decca over several decades. His recordings have won seven Grammy Awards, and he received Iceland’s Order of the Falcon for services to music. From the 1970s he built a parallel career as a conductor, holding posts with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, the NHK Symphony Orchestra and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. He was also a committed chamber musician, notably in partnership with violinist Itzhak Perlman and cellist Lynn Harrell.
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