Viktoria postnikova biography
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She remained very active throughout the 1990s and in 2004 was given the People's Artist Award in Russia. In 1968 she won 1st prize (together with Farhad Badalbeyli) at the Vianna da Motta International Music Competition in Lisbon.Two years later, in 1970, at the Fourth International Tchaikovsky Competition, she won joint 3rd prize with Arthur Moreira-Lima in the year when the joint first prize went to John Lill and Vladimir Krainev.
Her solo London debut was given in May 1968 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in a programme of L.v. Beethoven, Robert Schumann and F. Chopin. A certain controversy surrounded this placing and Hans Keller, who thought Postnikova should have won first place, wrote ‘With intensely restrained intensity, with breathtaking poise between extremes of contrasting emotion, with an originality of insight that made every phrase…sound brand new - in short, with continuous inspiration and mastery, this twenty-two-year-old girl gave performance after performance which showed where music came from: that it was an urgent communication inexpressible by any other means.
She graduated in 1967, having studied there and in postgraduate courses with Professor Yakov Flier. But it is not only her eclectic repertory that sets Postnikova apart from most other pianists, it is also the individuality of her interpretations, which often involve daringly slow tempos, as in her recordings of the Busoni Concerto and Tchaikovsky First.
At the first she played Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor Op. 11 and at the second, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor Op. 23. A child prodigy, she began studies at six at the Moscow Central Music School with Eleonora Musaelian. Among the many orchestras she has worked with in Europe are the Berlin Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw, and the London orchestras.
Of the three piano concertos by Tchaikovsky recorded for Decca in 1982 Postnikova gives a completely musically coherent reading of the Piano Concerto No. She has also recorded the Concerto for Piano and Strings and the Concerto for Piano Four Hands by Schnittke, the latter with the composer’s wife Irina as partner. Postnikova has toured throughout Europe, the Americas, Japan, and elsewhere, and appeared with the major orchestras of New York, Boston, Chicago, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Moscow.
6 to her and of which she has made an excellent recording, also for Chandos. After winning a prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition in 1965, Postnikova won joint second prize with Semyon Kruchin at the Leeds International Piano Competition in England the following year: first place was taken by Rafael Orozco.
Miss Postnikova is a supreme artist who composes while she plays.’ Postnikova was then offered two appearances at the Proms in 1967.
One of her greatest accomplishments is her recording of Tchaikovsky's complete piano works.
She takes part in concerts, recordings and recitals at home and abroad with her conductor husband Gennady Rozhdestvensky, whom she married in 1969. She entered the Central Music School of the Moscow Conservatory at age six, studying with E.B.
Musaelian.
Her repertoire is extremely broad, covering works by composers such as Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Liszt, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and Rachmaninoff and from more contemporary periods, such as music by Busoni, Ives, Britten, Shostakovich, and Schnittke.
Postnikova has performed with many conductors, including Adrian Boult, Kurt Masur, Kirill Kondrashin, Colin Davis, and her husband, Gennady Rozhdestvensky.
For the remainder of that decade and into the next she made a string of popular and highly praised recordings, chief among them her 1982 Decca set of the three Tchaikovsky piano concertos.