Vovka ashkenazy biography of barack biden

For the Record …. As a conductor, he has worked to bring the work of lesser-known modern Russian composers to a wider audience. Ashkenazy was born into a half-Jewish family in the Russian city of Gorky in , at the height of authoritarian repression in the Soviet Union under Communist leader Josef Stalin. His father was a professional pianist for a state entertainment agency, and earned a comfortable living by the Soviet standards of the day.

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After his music teacher explained how to read music, Ashkenazy caught on quickly, and was soon sight-reading music. At the age of seven, Ashkenazy enrolled in the Moscow Central School of Music, which served as the junior school for the Moscow Conservatory. He studied under Anaida Sumbatyan, an Armenian woman and well-known pianist in her day who had only recently started teaching.

There, he won the gold medal, and along with it a great deal of international press attention that hailed him as the newest classical prodigy to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain. He received a number of invitations to perform abroad, and his parents were rewarded with a luxurious two-room apartment in Moscow, where he lived as well. Because of the privileges he was given, however, he was also asked to spy on his fellow students at the Conservatory.

Addresses: Home — Kaeppelistr. In the fall of , Ashkenazy toured several United States and Canadian cities in an arrangement with concert impresario Sol Hurok, and the foreign critics wrote effusively of talents. In , he met a year-old pianist from London, born of an Icelandic family, at the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition. A year later, Thorunn Dody Johannsdottir moved to Moscow to study at the Conservatory, and the two began dating despite the pressure Ashkenazy — a celebrity in the Soviet Union — received from authorities for dating a foreigner.

Johannsdottir told him that she was willing to live in Soviet Union, and the two were married in