The prof. Victor Merzhanov’s recital
(17th  September 1999)

   
    Victor Merzhanov, is a professor of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and Hochschule fur Musik in Trossingen and a teacher at many international piano courses. During the fifty years of his work as a performer and over 40 years of his work as a teacher he won worldwide renown and was considered one of the most eminent contemporary artists-teachers. His students won nearly forty prizes at international competitions.
    He was born in 1919. He studied the piano at the Moscow conservatory with Samuel Feinberg and the organ with Alexandr Gedike (1936-1941).  In 1945, with Svatoslav Richter, they separately won the first prize at the All-USSR Piano Competition. In 1949 he received an honourable mention at the Fourth International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. His concert engagements have taken him to Canada, China, the Scandinavian countries and the majority of European countries as well as in America. He has recorded a number of disks for American, Japan, Italian and Russian companies. His extensive repertoire includes pieces from the Baroque to contemporary music – from works by Bach and Beethoven to those by Prokofiev and Shostakovitch.
    For more than twenty years he has been invited to sit on juries of the most prestigious piano competitions, for example in Brussels, Bolzano, Moscow and Warsaw. He was one of the jurors during the 13th International Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1985. For many years he has been also teaching at master piano courses, for example, many times, in Duszniki Zdroj and in Wroclaw. From the highest Polish authorities he received the Order of Merit, he was also awarded the medal „Distinguished for Wroclaw Voivodship and City of Wroclaw”. He is also an Honorary member of the Liszt Society in Wroclaw and Josef Hofmann Society.