Grigory Sokolov is considered one of the greatest pianists of our time and is renowned for his visionary power and unwavering dedication to music. His interpretations are based on a thorough knowledge of an extensive repertory. His concert programmes cover the entire history of music: from transcriptions of sacred polyphony and works by Byrd, Couperin, Rameau and Bach to Classical and Romantic repertory, especially Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin and Brahms, and on to key compositions of the 20th century.
Grigory Sokolov was born in Leningrad and studied with Leah Zelikhman at the Central Music School of the Leningrad Conservatory. In 1966 he made headlines outside the Soviet Union, when at the age of 16 he became the youngest ever musician to win the Gold Medal of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. He gave extensive concert tours in the USA and Japan in the 1970s. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he started to perform at the great international concert halls and at the most renowned festivals. As a soloist he worked with leading orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic before deciding to concentrate purely on solo recitals.
Today he gives around seventy concerts per season, dedicating himself to one single programme at a time. In addition, he ensures that he has a detailed technical knowledge of the instruments on which he plays. Before each recital, he explores the potential of the grand piano in question, in order that he can achieve the optimal sound results.
Since 2014 Grigory Sokolov has been an exclusive artist with Deutsche Grammophon. In 2015 the Russian pianist released a live recording of a concert that he had given at the Salzburg Festival, and in 2017 he released a disc of piano concertos by Mozart and Rachmaninoff. This CD recording was accompanied by Nadia Zhdanova’s documentary A Conversation That Never Was. A double CD featuring works by Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart was followed in 2022 by a concert recording from the Esterházy Palace with sonatas by Haydn, the Four Impromptus D. 935 by Schubert and a generous selection of encores.
