Piano Recital with Andrei Gavrilov

Thursday, 24 September 2026, 7.30 p.m., Kronenzentrum. At 6.45 p.m., Dr. Christina Dollinger will introduce the concert.

The evening's programme features five preludes and fugues from Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 8 in B-flat major, op. 84.

Andrei Gavrilov was born in 1955 in Moscow into an artistic family. His father Vladimir Gavrilov was a painter, and his mother was a pianist trained in the school of Heinrich Neuhaus. After initial lessons with his mother, Gavrilov graduated in 1973 from the Central School of Music at the State Moscow Conservatory and entered the Moscow Conservatory that same year. Until 1980, he performed in all the world's major concert halls. After years of politically enforced absence, he returned to the British stage in 1984 with concerts at the Barbican Centre and Royal Festival Hall. From 1994 to 2001, he took a break to pursue studies in philosophy and religion, before making a triumphant comeback in 2001 with a Russian tour - including four piano concertos in a single evening at the Moscow Conservatory. In April 2023, he performed the Well-Tempered Clavier Book I on a Japan tour; in October, he opened the season at the Megaron Athens with the Athens State Orchestra; in November, he gave a piano recital in Rome. In May 2024, he performed at the Berlin Piano Festival at Konzerthaus Berlin.

"Andrei Gavrilov is a temperamental artist who cannot always restrain his passions and constantly builds in a kind of playing frenzy. The man races through virtuosic passages like a whirlwind that gradually transforms into a hurricane. ... Actually, Gavrilov is neither a strongman nor a keyboard hack, but rather an artist of sometimes extremely lyrical sensibility." (Gerd Kowa, Die Rheinpfalz)