Arcadi Both of Volodos’s parents were professional choral singers, and it was this discipline that young Arcadi first studied at the St Petersburg Conservatory, subsequently studying conducting both there and at the Glinka Choir School. Volodos had played the piano from the age of eight, but it was not until he went to the Moscow Conservatory at the age of sixteen that he began to concentrate in earnest on this instrument, working with Galina Eguizarova who had also been the teacher of Radu Lupu.

At the age of twenty-one Volodos went to Paris to continue his studies with Jacques Rouvier at the Paris Conservatoire, then completed his tuition in Madrid with Dmitri Bashkirov at the Escuela Superior de Musica Reina Sofia. Volodos now lives in Spain, near Madrid, whereas his father lives in Paris and his remarried mother lives in St Petersburg.

Volodos has since given concerts in the United States and Europe. Although he took part in the international New Names programme in New York in 1991, it was five years later that he made his orchestral debut in Boston, replacing an indisposed Martha Argerich to play Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor Op. 18 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Seiji Ozawa. His career took off immediately, thanks in no small part to a compact disc issued by Sony in 1997 of piano transcriptions. In the same year Volodos toured Europe with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Riccardo Chailly ending with a performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor Op. 18 at the Proms in London. The same musicians then toured Canada and the United States, and in the summer of 1997 Volodos made his debut at the Tanglewood Festival with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Volodos has already appeared with the world’s great orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Dallas Symphony, the Toronto Symphony and the Royal Philharmonic, with conductors such as James Levine, Seiji Ozawa, Claus Peter Flor, Leonard Slatkin and Yevgeny Svetlanov.

An enigmatic and private figure who does not like to give interviews, Volodos will not play a work in public until he has absorbed at home the entire output of its composer. He is unusual in being one of the top rank of pianists who was not a child prodigy; and the fact that he only began to study the piano in his teens makes his present abilities all the more extraordinary. He has a French passport and has not retained dual nationality.

Volodos signed with Sony in 1997. His first disc was, quite simply, extraordinary. He plays a sequence of piano transcriptions by Gyorgy Cziffra, Samuel Feinberg, Franz Liszt and Volodos himself. He also includes unpublished transcriptions by Vladimir Horowitz, which he had learnt from listening to Horowitz’s recordings. The disc ends with Volodos’s own outrageous arrangement of Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca. Not only does Volodos display an unlimited technique, he has the poetry and depth of feeling for the slower works, and a glorious quality of tone. This wonderful tone was heard again on his next release, a disc taken from Volodos’s live debut at Carnegie Hall in October 1998. The opening of Schumann’s Bunte Blatter Op. 99 is artless in its simplicity, and everything Volodos does seems completely effortless. When he played this work in London in February 1999 he used a chair with a back and seemed to conjure the sounds from the keyboard as he leaned back with outstretched arms. Along with works by Rachmaninov and Scriabin, Volodos included two more transcriptions in which Horowitz had a hand, and his playing of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March could even be said to surpass the playing of Horowitz in its lightness and effortlessness.

For an artist of his extraordinary talents, it is surprising that Sony did not get Volodos into the recording studio more often, but maybe this was because his concert schedule was so demanding. In fact, Volodos may have been playing too much in public; some of his more recent performances at the European festivals have been disappointing in so far as he plays some of his virtuoso repertoire with a vehemence and lack of taste. Two further Sony compact discs feature recordings of live performances. With the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Volodos plays Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor Op. 30, with James Levine conducting. To fill the disc, solo works by Rachmaninov were recorded in a Berlin studio; they include a ravishing transcription by Volodos of the Andante from Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata Op. 19. This is playing of the highest order, with a vocal line that floats above the accompaniment. Again with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Volodos played Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor Op. 23 with Seiji Ozawa conducting. More Rachmaninov solos, recorded in Berlin in 2003, complete the disc, but the final track of Volodos’s arrangement of Rachmaninov’s Polka Italienne borders on the vulgar. In the eight years that Volodos has been with Sony, there have only been two solo studio recordings: the initial disc of transcriptions, and a disc of Schubert recorded in July 2001. Volodos plays two Schubert piano sonatas including the G major D. 894. It is a wonderful disc, full of poetry and feeling, colour and warmth. Bryce Morrison wrote of ‘…an empathy with Schubert’s spirit so total that it would be extraordinary in a pianist of any age, let alone one still in his twenties’. Volodos also plays one of Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert’s songs, Der Muller und der Bach, about which Morrison wrote, ‘…he conveys the young miller’s despair with a poise that few could approach let alone equal… this is among the finest piano discs to have come my way for many years.’

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — Jonathan Summers (A–Z of Pianists, Naxos 8.558107–10).