Mikhail Pletnev s first prize in the 1978 Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition brought him his international breakthrough and quickly led to appearances in all the world s major concert halls with its finest orchestras and conductors. He was born into a musical family in Arkhangelsk in 1957 and was still a child when he received his first piano lessons. At the age of thirteen he enrolled at the Central Music School in Moscow and four years later switched to the Moscow Conservatory, where his teachers included Yakov Fliyer, who had been taught by a pupil of a pupil of Liszt, and Lev Vlasenko. But within two years of winning the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition, Pletnev had already laid the foundations for a second career as a conductor, a career in which he has arguably made an even greater name for himself than as a pianist. Ten years later his achievements in this field brought him to the attention of audiences all over the world when with the support of the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, he founded the Russian National Orchestra, the first fully independent orchestra in his country s history. It was soon a magnet for leading Russian musicians and an ensemble of international standing. Pletnev remains the orchestra s artistic director and principal conductor. Meanwhile he has also appeared as a guest conductor with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, to name but four. In 2008 he was appointed principal guest conductor of the Lugano-based Orchestra della Svizzera italiana. But Pletnev has a third musical string to his bow as a composer whose work-list, running to two dozen titles, includes a Classical Symphony, a Triptych, a Fantasy on Kazakh Themes and a Capriccio for piano and orchestra. More important, however, is the fact that Pletnev remains active as a pianist. True, it was four years after he had signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon in 1993 that his first solo album an all-Chopin recital was released by the Yellow Label, but it was immediately voted Disc of the Year by the German music critic Joachim Kaiser. Recorded live, his Carnegie Hall debut in 2000 received an ECHO Klassik Award, and his 2003 recording of his own Suite from Prokofiev s Cinderella, performed in his own two-piano arrangement with Martha Argerich, was showered with accolades, including a Grammy®, the German Record Critics Prize, a Diapason d or, a Choc du Monde de la musique and a MIDEM Classical Award. His interest in chamber music and, more especially, in rarely performed repertory is attested by his 2003 recording of Taneyev s Piano Trio and Quintet. In 2007 he returned to the classics and at the same time to the orchestra with Beethoven s complete concertos. In the reference work on pianists PianistenProfile, Gregor Willmes has argued that Pletnev s playing operates within the field of tension between concentrated analysis and self-confident subjectivity . Superficial virtuosity is of no more interest to Pletnev than uncontrolled emotionality. Over time, his tone has gained in substance, while his touch remains hard to beat. It was not long after his first recordings had appeared on the market that Pletnev undertook a foray into the pre-Classical period in the form of sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, following this up in 1998 with a recording of solo keyboard works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Johann Sebastian s second son left a number of shorter keyboard pieces as well as around 150 sonatas, most of them in three movements, together with rondos and fantasies. Music historians regularly describe him as a forerunner of Viennese Classicism. And yet he was less interested in matters of formal design as such, however significant his achievements in this field may have been, than in extending and refining the existin