Valery Pavlovich Afanasiev (Valery Afanassiev) |

Valery Afanassiev

Valery Afanasiev is a famous pianist, conductor, and writer, born in Moscow in 1947. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where his teachers were J. Zak and E. Gilels. In 1968, Valery Afanasiev became the winner of the International Competition. J.S. Bach in Leipzig, and in 1972 he won the competition. Belgian Queen Elisabeth in Brussels. Two years later, the musician moved to Belgium, currently lives in Versailles (France).

Valery Afanasiev performs in Europe, the USA and Japan, and recently he regularly gives concerts in his homeland. Among his regular stage partners are famous musicians – G.Kremer, Y.Milkis, G.Nunes, A.Knyazev, A.Ogrinchuk and others. The musician is a participant in well-known Russian and foreign festivals: December Evenings (Moscow), Stars of the White Nights (St. Petersburg), Blooming Rosemary (Chita), International Festival of Arts. A.D. Sakharov (Nizhny Novgorod), the International Music Festival in Colmar (France) and others.

The pianist’s repertoire includes works by composers of various eras: from W. A. ​​Mozart, L. van Beethoven and F. Schubert to J. Krum, S. Reich and F. Glass.

The musician has recorded about twenty CDs for Denon, Deutsche Grammophon and others. Valery Afanasiev’s latest recordings include J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Schubert’s last three sonatas, all concertos, the last three sonatas, and Beethoven’s Variations on a Theme of Diabelli. The musician also writes the texts of the booklets for his discs on his own. Its purpose is to let the listener understand how the performer penetrates the soul and creative process of the composer.

For several years, the musician has performed as a conductor with various orchestras around the world (in Russia he performed at the P.I. Tchaikovsky BSO), striving to get closer to the models of his favorite conductors – Furtwängler, Toscanini, Mengelberg, Knappertsbusch, Walter and Klemperer.

Valery Afanasiev is also known as a writer. He created 10 novels – eight in English, two in French, published in France, Russia and Germany, as well as novels, short stories, poetry cycles written in English, French and Russian, “An Essay on Music” and two theatrical plays, inspired by Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Schumann’s Kreisleriana, in which the author acts both as a pianist and as an actor. The solo performance Kreisleriana starring Valery Afanasyev was staged at the Moscow Theater School of Dramatic Art in 2005.

Valery Afanasiev is one of the most unusual contemporary artists. He is a man of exceptional erudition and is also widely known as an antique collector and wine connoisseur. In his house in Versailles, where the pianist, poet and philosopher Valery Afanasiev lives and writes his books, more than three thousand bottles of the rarest wines are kept. Jokingly, Valery Afanasiev calls himself “a man of the Renaissance.”

Source: Moscow Philharmonic website