Boris Bloch

USA

Boris Bloch was born in Odessa - formerly the southern Soviet Union, today a famous Ukrainian city, - in 1951 to parents of Jewish Ukrainian descent. He started piano lessons at the age of six, continuing to study with E. Levinsohn at the Odessa Stoliarsky School. In September 1968 he entered the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, at first in the class of Tatiana Nikolaewa and in 1970 that of Dmitry Bashkirov.

In 1969 Boris Bloch was a prize winner of the International Schumann Competition at Zwickau and in 1972 he won the 2nd Prize at the 4^th National Piano Competition of the USSR held in Minsk.

In 1974 the Bloch family moved to the USA. Two years later Boris won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York and that same year gave his New York Debut. The New York Times in its review the next day compared Bloch to the revered Simon Barer and the Los Angeles Times, following Bloch's debut there in 1979 - to Vladimir Horowitz.

Boris Bloch met Mr.Horowitz at the great pianist's town house in Manhattan in 1977. The legendary' Maestro's words upon listening to Bloch's play the G Minor Sonata of

Schumann, the Spanish Rhapsody of Liszt and the works of Chopin and Rachmaninov were:

"You are blessed with great pianistic gifts and that is most important!"

Also in 1977 Boris Bloch met the other pianistic legend of the 20^th century, Arthur Rubinstein, as Maestro himself awarded Bloch with the Silver Medal Prize at the Arthur Rubinstein Piano Masters Competition in Jerusalem.

In 1978 Boris Bloch won the Grand 1^st Prize at the Busoni Competition in Bolzano. Starting that time he performs regularly all over Europe and the United States with the orchestras of Vienna and Zurich, Rome and Milan, Moscow and Kyiv, Petersburg and Bergen, Salzburg and Budapest, Sofia and Bucharest, Berlin and Hamburg, Cleveland and Houston, Indianapolis and Vancouver conducted among others by Lorin Maaz el, Kirill Kondrashin, Hans Graf, Youri Aronovitch, Christoph Eschenbach, Adam Fischer, David Zinmann, Alexander Dmitriev and Mark Gorenstein.

He performs regularly at world's greatest festivals including Salzburg, Lucerne, Chopin-Duszniki, Carinthia, Istanbul, Ruhr, Varna, Rheingau etc, and is a sought-after juror at many

piano competitions including Busoni, Clara Schumann in Dusseldorf, Liszt in Utrecht, Weimar and Parma, Viotti in Vercelli etc.

Boris Bloch conducts regularly Master classes above all at the Summer Academy "Mozarteum" in Salzburg, Weimarer Master Courses, Santander Summer School etc.

Boris Bloch holds a Chair of Piano at the Academy of Music, Theater and Dance ,,Folkwang" at Essen.