Vladimir Sofronitsky

Vladimir Sofronitsky studied at Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are classical music. Employment is recorded with Moscow Conservatory. Distinctions recorded are Stalin Prize, Order of Lenin, Honored art worker of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and Order of the Badge of Honour.

Vladimir Sofronitsky was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. His father was a physics teacher and his mother came from an artistic family. In 1903, his family moved to Warsaw, where he started piano lessons with Anna Lebedeva-Getcevich (a student of Nikolai Rubinstein), and later (at the age of nine) with Aleksander Michałowski. From 1916 to 1921, Sofronitsky studied at the Petrograd Conservatory under Leonid Nikolayev, where Dmitri Shostakovich, Maria Yudina, and Elena Scriabina, the eldest daughter of Alexander Scriabin (who had died in 1915), were among his classmates. He met Scriabina in 1917 and married her in 1920. He had previously expressed a sympathy for Scriabin's piano music—as attested by Yudina—and he now had a greater intellectual and emotional connection to Scriabin's works through his wife and through the Scriabin in-laws. Sofronitsky was also acclaimed as an outstanding pianist by the composer Alexander Glazunov and the musicologist and critic Alexander Ossovsky. He gave his first solo concert in 1919, and made his only foreign tour between 1928 and 1929, in France. The only other time he performed outside the Soviet Union was at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, when he was suddenly sent by Stalin to play for the allied leaders. Sofronitsky taught at the Leningrad Conservatory from 1936 to 1942, and then at the Moscow Conservatory until his death. He was awarded a Stalin Prize of the first class in 1943 and proclaimed an Honoured Artist of the RSFSR in 1942. He gave many performances at the Scriabin Museum in Moscow, especially during the latter part of his career. Sofronitsky made a moderate number of recordings in the last two decades of his life, although fewer than those made by Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels, from the younger generation of Soviet pianists. Drawn principally to Romantic repertoire, Sofronitsky recorded a large number of Scriabin's works and also compositions by Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Lyadov, Rachmaninoff, Medtner, Prokofiev, and others.

• Vladimir Sofronitsky official website (in English and in Russian) • Vladimir Sofronitsky Tribute – Discography • Denon Classics' Russian releases (Japanese) • Maria Yudina's recollection on Sofronitsky • Recording of Sofronitsky teaching • Der Pianist, der den Richter entzückte. Spiegel. (in German) • About Vladimir Sofronitsky. Peoples. (in Russian)