Yulianna Avdeeva

Yulianna Avdeeva first appeared at the Prague Spring in 2011, immediately after her victory at the celebrated International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. She was only the fourth woman in the competition’s history to win the event. Following this success she gave her debut with the New York Philharmonic under Alan Gilbert in Warsaw and in New York, she performed with the NHK Symphony Orchestra under conductor Charles Dutoit in Tokyo, and she gave her first recital in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. Since that time she has appeared with the world’s finest orchestras and conductors. As a chamber musician she is collaborating this season with members of the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival and performing in concert with violinist Julia Fischer and cellist Daniel Müller-Schott at the Rheingau Musik Festival and in London’s Wigmore Hall.  

At the Rudolf Firkušný Piano Festival Yulianna Avdeeva will present a programme of preludes and fugues by Dmitri Shostakovich, the 50th anniversary of whose death we mark in 2025. The cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues, which the Russian composer wrote in the early 1950s, was inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Like the German master before him, Shostakovich wrote a prelude and fugue in each of the major and minor keys of the chromatic scale. In doing so the composer left behind one of the most significant piano cycles of the 20th century, a monument of piano literature which only a handful of pianists have in their repertoire. In addition to the Firkušný festival Avdeeva will present the work at the Leipzig Gewandhaus during the Shostakovich Festival Leipzig, which is co-organised by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Andris Nelsons, and she will also give performances in Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal and in Barcelona and Madrid. Her appearance at the Rudolf Firkušný Piano Festival promises a truly unique rendition of this work.