Vladimir Ashkenazy is one of the finest pianists this century has produced, and he has in the past decade become a formidable conductor as well. Born in the Soviet Union, but having lived in the West since 1963, he is a man who has not only devoted his life to music, but has also searched for absolute values upon which to base his life - values distinct from the vastly different but nonetheless often compromised standards of both Soviet and Western society. His life and his insights, as well as his superlative music-making, are a continuing source of soul-searching and inspiration.
Ashkenazy was born on July 6, 1937, in the city of Gorki, about 250 miles east of Moscow on the river Volga. His father David was of Jewish lineage, but did not retain his forefathers' faith or traditions. Ashkenazy's mother, Evstolia, was of pure Russian descent. The infant Vladimir was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, and he says he still feels close to Orthodox Christian ideas, at least in principle.
Ashkenazy's father was a variety-show pianist of astonishing improvisational ability and versatility. Because he was almost constantly away on tour, it was Ashkenazy's mother who brought him up and oversaw his education. The family moved to Moscow, where at the age of six Ashkenazy began studying the piano. He showed extraordinary talent, and when he was eight, after a rigorous examination before a panel of professors, he was accepted into the Central Music School, which acts as a kind of junior school for the Moscow Conservatoire.
Ashkenazy's teacher at the Central Music School was Anaida Sumbatian, and she had a profound influence on his musical development. In the biography/autobiography Beyond Frontiers, co-authored by Ashkenazy and his long-time agent and friend Jasper Parrott, (New York: Atheneum, 1985), Ashkenazy remembers that Sumbatian "inspired the imagination of her pupils with all sorts of associative ideas." She encouraged young Ashkenazy to attend orchestral concerts so that he would learn to think orchestrally at the piano - something he does to this day. This avid concert-going, he speculates, may have formed the subliminal basis for his conducting later on.
Sumbatian made sure that when Ashkenazy moved on to the Moscow Conservatoire his teacher was Boris Zemlyansky. "It was Zemlyansky, I suppose, who really made music my life," Ashkenazy reflects in Beyond Frontiers. Zemlyansky's lessons were "infused with the certainty that what one did, or at least tried to do, had a fundamental importance in an absolute sense." It was from Zemlyansky, and from his mother as well, that Ashkenazy learned the habit of rigorous self-discipline and hard work that has sustained him throughout his career.
In an interview Mr. Ashkenazy granted THE WORLD & I in Strasbourg, France, he was asked if the reason why so many great interpreters come from the Soviet Union is because the regime trains performers to win international competitions. "No," he replied. "It's a very good musical tradition which goes back more than a hundred years. It's a big nation, so it has a lot of talent…. [It's] a very talented nation, a very clever nation, so there are many people to choose from. And education is very well established….All this goes to produce very good players. As for great players - great talents are few. Few and far between. So in Russia there are also very few of great talent. The discipline is very strong, the education is very,
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