Mikhail Pletnev

In 1990 Mikhail Pletnev founded the Russian National Orchestra, the first orchestra in the country since 1917 to exist outside state funding, and led it as principal conductor and then artistic director across many years. He had arrived there from the keyboard: born in Arkhangelsk in 1957, a pupil of Yakov Flier and Lev Vlassenko at the Moscow Conservatory, gold medallist at the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1978 at twenty-one. His playing — Scarlatti, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff — is documented on Virgin Classics and Deutsche Grammophon, alongside a Tchaikovsky concerto cycle and, as conductor, a complete set of the Beethoven symphonies. His own concert transcriptions from The Nutcracker and The Sleeping Beauty have passed into other pianists' recital programmes. He composes as well, and has done since the late 1970s. He first conducted in 1980. His contract with the Russian National Orchestra was not renewed in 2022. In the same year he formed the Rachmaninoff International Orchestra.