Violetta Egorova is a Russian pianist whose deep commitment to music extends far beyond her chosen instrument. She began playing the piano at
the age of four and made her television debut two years later. She went on to study at the Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory under Lev Naumov, known as the »godfather of the Russian piano school«. She has established herself as a caring, effective ambassador for preserving and honouring the tradition of the famous Russian piano school and Russian classical music in general. The artistic director of the Rachmaninoff Academy in Italy since 2011, she also gives masterclasses and is the artistic director of the Moscow ConcertFest. She returns to Ljubljana with a German programme: the Variations and Fugue in E-flat major, Op. 35, the main theme of which Ludwig van Beethoven used in several other compositions (including the Eroica Symphony, after which the variations were subsequently nicknamed) and the same composer’s famous proto-Romantic Moonlight Sonata will be followed after the interval by Robert Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes. The »symphonic« nature of this set of études is revealed both in the freedom of the variation form from the conventions of the bourgeois salon and in the wide range of diverse textures which the pianist juxtaposes and combines in the manner of a symphony orchestra.