Alexander Toradze

	Alexander Toradze

Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, Alexander Toradze graduated from the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow and soon became a professor there. In 1983, he moved permanently to the United States. In 1991, he was appointed as the Martin Endowed Professor of Piano at Indiana University South Bend, where he has created a teaching environment that is unparalleled in its unique concept. The members of the multi-national Toradze Piano Studio have developed into a worldwide touring ensemble that has gathered great critical acclaim on an international level. In the 2002-2003 season, the Studio appeared in New York performing the complete cycle of Bach solo concerti as well as Scriabin's complete sonata cycle. The Studio has also performed projects detailing the piano and chamber works of Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Dvorak and Stravinsky in Rome, Venice and Ravenna, Italy, the Ruhr Klavier Festival and Berlin Festivals in Germany, and in the United States in Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Alexander Toradze is universally recognized as a masterful virtuoso in the grand Romantic tradition. He has enriched the Great Russian pianistic heritage with his own unorthodox interpretative conceptions, deeply poetic lyricism, and intensely emotional excitement. Mr. Toradze's recent recording of all five Prokofiev concertos with Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra for the Philips label, is acclaimed by critics as definitive. His recording of Prokofiev's Piano Concert No. 3 was named by International Piano Quarterly as "historically the best on record" (from among over seventy recordings). Other highly successful recordings have included Scriabin's Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, with the Kirov Orchestra, Valery Gergiev conducting as well as recital albums of the works of Mussorgsky, Stravinsky, Ravel and Prokofiev for the Angel/EMI label.