Vladimir Ashkenazy and Hélène Grimaud

Vladimir Ashkenazy and Hélène Grimaud

Vladimir Ashkenazy, conductor
NHK Orchestra of Tokyo
Hélène Grimaud, piano
Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1
Elgar Enigma Variations
Debussy La Mer

Vladimir Ashkenazy, conductor

Vladimir Ashkenazy studied at the Moscow Conservatory and gained widespread attention as a piano soloist after winning second prize in the 1955 Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and first prizes in the 1956 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels and the 1962 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. For the past twenty years, he has devoted the majority of his music career to conducting. Mr. Ashkenazy made his San Francisco Symphony debut in 1958 as soloist in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and returned many times before making his conducting debut with the Orchestra in 1990. His most recent appearance with the SFS was in January 2004, when he conducted Franck’s Psyché and Honegger’s Symphony No. 2, and led the Orchestra, Chorus, and vocal soloists in the Fauré Requiem.

Mr. Ashkenazy currently serves as Music Director of the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, a post he assumed in September 2004 after serving as chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic from 1998 to 2003. He led the NHK Symphony on tour in summer 2004, including performances at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and plans for coming seasons include major tours of Europe and the US and recordings of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky symphonies. As Conductor Laureate of the Philharmonia Orchestra, Mr. Ashkenazy leads that orchestra in London and around the UK, tours with the ensemble throughout the world, and has developed projects including Prokofiev and Shostakovich under Stalin in 2003 (a project he also took to Cologne, New York, Vienna, and Moscow) and Rachmaninoff Revisited in 2002 at Lincoln Center. Mr. Ashkenazy is also Director of the European Union Youth Orchestra, with which he tours each season, and Conductor Laureate of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. He maintains strong links with a number of other major orchestras, including the Cleveland Orchestra (of which he is a former principal guest conductor) and the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin (where he was chief conductor and music director from 1988 through 1996). He makes guest appearances with major orchestras around the world.

Vladmir Ashkenazy continues to devote himself to piano, directing Mozart and Beethoven concertos from the keyboard in performances in Europe and Asia, and he continues to build his recording catalogue with releases including the 1999 Grammy-winning Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues, Rautavaara’s Piano Concerto No. 3 (a work he commissioned), and Rachmaninoff transcriptions. His most recent release is a recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Throughout his career, Mr. Ashkenazy has created programs to ensure that concert music continues to have a platform in the mainstream media and is available to as broad an audience as possible. His Ashkenazy in Moscow programs marked his first visit, in 1989, to the country of his birth since leaving the USSR in the 1960s; more recently, he has developed educational programs with NHK-TV, including Superteachers, which spotlights Mr. Ashkenazy working with inner-city London schoolchildren, and a documentary based on his Prokofiev and Shostakovich under Stalin project.
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