When Arcadi Volodos conquered concert halls all over the world with his breathtaking piano playing and own transcriptions, everyone hailed him as the “new Horowitz”. In the meantime, he has shown that he is much more than that: his boundless virtuosity along with his unique sense of timing, colour and poetry have made him a romantic narrator of powerful stories. A baroque melody played by Arcadi Volodos is as striking and fascinating as a performance of the Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto.

Born in St Petersburg in 1972, Volodos first studied vocals and conducting, but did not begin to study the piano seriously until 1987 at the St Petersburg State Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire. He then pursued his studies at the Moscow Conservatoire under Galina Egiazarova, and later in Paris and Madrid.

Since his New York debut in 1996, Volodos has performed in recitals and has appeared internationally with many of the most renowned orchestras and conductors, including the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra led by, among others, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Myung-Whun Chung, Michael Tilson-Thomas, Valery Gergiev, James Levine, Zubin Mehta and Seiji Ozawa. Mr Volodos regularly appears in recitals at Carnegie Hall in New York, the Philharmonie in Berlin, Vienna’s Musikverein and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris as well as in Chicago, Los Angeles and every major European city. Since his highly acclaimed debut at the Salzburg Festival in 2002, he has been invited to return there every subsequent year. In 2009, Arcadi Volodos opened the Liszt-Szenen in Salzburg and went on to tour South America. Future engagements include recitals and concerts in Korea, Munich, Zurich, Madrid, Lisbon, Amsterdam, the Klavier-Festival Ruhr and La Roque d’Anthéron. He collaborates with conductors including Vasily Petrenko, Vladimir Jurowski and Riccardo Chailly.

Arcadi Volodos made his now historic Carnegie Hall recital debut in the autumn of 1998, recorded by Sony Classical and entitled Arcadi Volodos Live at Carnegie Hall. Since then he has released various CDs, among them interpretations of Schubert’s Sonatas, Rachmaninoff’s solo pieces and transcriptions and live performances of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under James Levine and Seiji Ozawa. In February 2007, Sony Classical released his latest CD Volodos Plays Liszt, for which Arcadi Volodos was hailed by Gramophone Magazine and received the Diapason D’Or and the ECHO-Klassik Award in 2007. In spring 2010, Arte will be broadcasting his recital at the Musikverein in Vienna in March 2008, which will also be released on CD and DVD.