Biography
Vladimir Sofronitsky was born to a physics teacher father and a mother 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 (from age nine) with Aleksander Michałowski.
From 1916 to 1921, Sofronitsky studied in the Petrograd Conservatory under Leonid Nikolayev, where Dmitri Shostakovich, Maria Yudina, and Elena Scriabina, the eldest daughter of the deceased Alexander Scriabin, were among his classmates. He met Scriabina in 1917 and married her in 1920. While he had already divulged a sympathy for the piano music of the recently deceased mystic composer—as attested by Yudina—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 his only foreign tour in France between 1928 and 1929. 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 gave many performances at the Scriabin Museum in Moscow, especially during the latter part of his career.
Sofronitsky made a fair number of recordings in the last two decades of his life, but a relatively small number overall compared with the titanic efforts of his younger countrymen Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels. Drawn principally to Romantic repertoire, Sofronitsky recorded a large number of Scriabin works and also compositions by Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Lyadov, Rachmaninoff, Medtner, Prokofiev, and others.
His daughter is the Canadian classical pianist Viviana Sofronitsky.
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