Konstantin Scherbakov

Pianist Konstantin Scherbakov has a recording catalog comprising more than 60 albums. His work emphasizes Russian music, the virtuoso tradition, and Beethoven. Scherbakov is also a concerto performer who has worked under top conductors from Russia and beyond. He has recorded for Naxos, Marco Polo, Steinway & Sons, and other labels; on Naxos, he released the album Liszt: Mozart and Donizetti Opera Transcriptions in 2025. Scherbakov was born in Barnaul, Siberia, Russia, on June 11, 1963. He took up the piano at five and was soon noted as a child prodigy, performing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, Op. 15. He attended the Moscow Conservatory, where his principal teacher was Lev Naumov. Scherbakov won the premiere Rachmaninoff International Competition in Moscow in 1983, and as Soviet restrictions on travel to the West loosened, he performed in the West as well, giving four recitals covering Rachmaninov's complete solo piano output at the Asolo Chamber Music Festival in Italy in 1990. Scherbakov moved to Zurich, Switzerland, in 1992 and soon began to find recording opportunities. An early album in the West was Sergei Michailovich Liapunov: Transcendental Etudes, Op. 11, released on the Marco Polo label. Scherbakov has had a distinguished concert career that includes appearances with top conductors such as Christian Thielemann, Rudolf Barshai, Kirill Petrenko, and Aldo Ceccato. His repertory includes everything that Beethoven, Godowsky, Shostakovich, Respighi, and Rachmaninov wrote for the piano, as well as works by composers as diverse as Domenico Scarlatti and César Franck, and he has recorded much of this material. He has recorded the complete works of Godowsky on 15 albums. Another focus is Beethoven, not only the original music but also the transcriptions of his symphonies by Liszt. Scherbakov has high visibility at festivals, especially in the German-speaking world; they include events at Salzburg, Lucerne, Bonn (the Beethoven Festival), and Weimar (the Liszt Festival). In 2019 and 2020, he recorded several albums for Steinway & Sons, including a complete cycle of Beethoven's sonatas. Scherbakov has recorded Godowsky's 53 Studies on the Chopin Étudies; the second volume of that cycle appeared on Marco Polo in 2023. That was followed in 2025 by Liszt: Mozart and Donizetti Opera Transcriptions on Naxos. Scherbakov joined the faculty at the Hochschule für Musik Winterthur-Zurich in 1998, and he continued to teach there as of the mid-2020s. ~ James Manheim, Rovi