http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/arts/music/nikolai-petrov-virtuoso-pianist-dies-at-68.html?_r=1&ref=musicNikolai Petrov, a Top Soviet-Era Pianist, Dies at 68By THE ASSOCIATED PRESSPublished: August 6, 2011 MOSCOW (AP) — Nikolai Petrov, a virtuoso pianist and one of the few Soviet musicians to play abroad during the cold war, died here on Wednesday. He was 68.
Mr. Petrov’s spokesman confirmed his death to Russian news agencies. Mr. Petrov suffered a stroke in May while touring in Belarus and had been in the hospital since then.
Nikolai Arnoldovich Petrov was born on April 14, 1943, into a family of musicians. He started touring in the early 1960s and performed with the New York Symphony Orchestra, the Washington National Symphony Orchestra and top European orchestras. He made his New York City debut at Carnegie Hall in 1965. But he always regarded the Moscow Conservatory as his main stage.
Mr. Petrov was only 19 when he won second prize at the first Van Cliburn competition in Texas in 1962, and he served as a Cliburn competition juror in 1977. He specialized in the music of Liszt and Prokofiev, all of whose sonatas he has recorded.
In 1986, Mr. Petrov and the conductor Yuri Temirkanov were the first Soviet musicians to appear in the United States under the terms of a newly adopted United States-Soviet cultural exchange, performing with the New York Philharmonic.
In reviewing a performance at Carnegie Hall in 1989, Will Crutchfield wrote in The New York Times: “Nikolai Petrov is a burly, hearty Russian bear of a pianist who has plenty of technique and sees no good reason why a piano recital shouldn’t be an hour of fun.”
But his technique was also criticized as almost too precise. Bernard Holland wrote in The Times in 1987: “One had the odd feeling that if this pianist were perhaps able to play his instrument just a little less well, his music might move us more. The listener, in other words, was made constantly aware of the craft of making music on a keyboard, often to the exclusion of the music itself.”
While Russian classical music was suffering from a lack of investment in the 1990s, Mr. Petrov was one of the few musicians to remain based in Russia and help young musicians.
“He had lots of opportunities to emigrate,” the Russian pianist Denis Matsuev told the ITAR-Tass news agency. “But his heart was here and it ached for what was happening in the country.”
Mr. Petrov is survived by his wife and daughter.
Additional reporting by The New York Times.
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