Elisabeth Leonskaja

Elisabeth Leonskaja, who was born in 1945 in Tbilisi, Georgia, to a Russian family, studied piano under Jakov Milstein at the Moscow Conservatory. She won the George Enescu Competition in Bucharest in 1964 and received awards at the Concours Long-Thibaud in Paris in 1965 and at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 1968. A decisive influence on her artistic development was her collaboration with Sviatoslav Richter, with whom she gave numerous concerts as a duo and explored the repertoire for two pianos and piano four hands. In 1978, Leonskaja left the former Soviet Union and emigrated to Vienna. The Salzburg Festival invited her to give a piano recital in 1979, which brought her sudden recognition in the West. She subsequently appeared as a soloist with leading European and American orchestras and worked with conductors such as Sir Colin Davis, Christoph von Dohnányi, Christoph Eschenbach, Mariss Jansons, Kurt Masur, Kurt Sanderling, and Yuri Temirkanov. She has given recitals in major cities and has been a guest at festivals in Edinburgh, Vienna, Schleswig-Holstein, and Salzburg, as well as at the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg. Leonskaja is deeply committed to chamber music and was a long-time partner of the Alban Berg Quartet and Guarneri Quartet; today she performs primarily with the Borodin Quartet and the Artemis Quartet. Her recordings have received numerous awards, including the Prix Caecilia and the Diapason d’or. She was honored with the ICMA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020, and in 2021 she was named Instrumentalist of the Year at the Opus Klassik Awards. Her most recent release includes a complete recording of Mozart’s piano sonatas (2022) and works for piano by Franz Schubert (2023). In 2024, her accounts of the piano concertos by Schumann and Brahms were released, along with an album featuring works of the Second Viennese School. Elisabeth Leonskaja is the recipient of the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, First Class.

May 2026