Mikko Franck and Anna Vinnitskaya

Be it Bach or Shostakovich: Anna Vinnitskaya only plays, in her own words, music about which she has something to say interpretatively that she can pass on to her audience. Despite her astounding piano technique, virtuosity for its own sake is not what interests this personable artist, who is acclaimed around the world for sensitive interpretations by both concertgoers and critics. After being awarded First Prize for piano in 2007 as the second woman in the history of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussel, Anna Vinnitskaya has in the meantime proven on all the world’s significant concert stages that there’s a whole range of composers about whom she has “something to say”. At the heart of her wide-ranging repertoire are masters of Russian and Soviet music such as Sergei Rachmaninov, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. But Johann Sebastian Bach, Frédéric Chopin, Johannes Brahms, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel are also congenially interpreted by Anna Vinnitskaya.

The artist, who was born in Novorossiysk on the Black Sea in 1983 and has been playing piano since the age of six, owes the ability to do justice to such a stylistic range to two mentors above all: she learned to “sing on the piano” from Sergei Ossipenko, with whom she studied between 1995 and 2001 at the Rachmaninov Conservatory in Rostov-on-Don, Anna Vinnitskaya disclosed recently in an interview; Evgeni Koroliov, whose master class at the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater she attended in later years, was the one who then taught her to develop a musical independence. These qualities – a cantabile touch and an independent and fresh expressive power – already characterized the piano recital with which Anna Vinnitskaya made her Philharmonic debut in October 2017.

At these concerts she can be experienced as soloist in a work that played a decisive role in her career: after all, with her interpretation of Sergei Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, a work that oscillates between musical Romanticism and avantgarde that premiered in 1913, Anna Vinnitskaya won the final round of the Concours Musical Reine Elisabeth in 2007. Her musical partner conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker is Mikko Franck, born in Helsinki in 1979, who has programmed, in addition to a work by his compatriot Einojuhani Rautavaara, who died in 2016, compositions by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, textbook examples of musical impressionism.