Van Cliburn Prize Winner, Pianist Vladimir Viardo, at DePauw April 6 & 7

March 31, 2005

March 31, 2005, Greencastle, Ind. - Internationally renowned pianist and Van Cliburn top prize winner Vladimir Viardo will come to the campus of DePauw University to perform a piano recital on Thursday, April 7, at 7:30 p.m. in Thompson Recital Hall of the Performing Arts Center. The concert, which will feature works by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Debussy and Brahms, is free and open to the public.

Born in the Caucasus Mountains near the Black Sea, Vladimir Viardo's unique artistry has made him amongst the world's most celebrated pianists. International acknowledgement came to him at the age of twenty-one, after winning a "Grand Prix" and the "Prix du Prince Rainier" in the 1971 Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition in Paris. Two years later, competing with sixty-six of the best pianists from twenty-one countries, Viardo received the top prize in the Fourth Quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. 

For nearly thirteen years, Mr. Viardo was unjustly restrained from continuing his flourishing international career and was a virtual prisoner behind the iron curtain. Only when the new era of Glasnost and Perestroika began opening the doors of the then-Soviet Union was Viardo to accept engagements in Germany and in the United States. He was immediately offered a tour and recording contract with the Dallas Symphony and a position as artist-in-residence at the University of North Texas.

An extraordinary and celebrated teacher, Viardo is a custodian of the Heinrich Neuhaus method, a technique credited for producing such extraordinary twentieth-century Russian keyboard masters as Gilels and Richter. He will be imparting this knowledge to DePauw's pianists during a master class on Wednesday, April 6, which begins at 3 p.m. in Thompson Recital Hall. Viardo's master classes are much in demand throughout the world and his name appears in the book, The Most Wanted Piano Teachers in the USA.

Vladimir Viardo's tours have taken him to all leading American and Canadian cities, as well as major European cities, Asia, South Africa and Central and South America, appearing as a soloist with most of the prominent conductors including Kondrashin, Mehta, Kitaenko, Maazel, Spivakov, Comissiona, Maxim Shostakovich, Jordania, Penderecki, among others, with concerts at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln and Kennedy Centres, Alice Tully Hall, Salle Pleyel, Concertgebouw, Whigmore Hall, Casals Hall of Tokyo, Fundacao Gulbenkien, and all major halls in Russia , Ukraine, Finland, Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.

"Vladimir Viardo and I both participated in and were prize winners at the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud International Competition in Paris in 1971," says Claude Cymerman, professor of piano in the DePauw School of Music. "I lost touch with him for many years and was enchanted to meet him again at the Flaine International Academy in the French Alps two years ago. His recitial and master class there were outstanding. We became friends, and I worked to bring him to DePauw for this upcoming event."

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