Oxana Yablonskaya Becomes Yamaha Artist

BUENA PARK, CA (September 09, 2004) Award-winning pianist and Juilliard School of Music teacher Oxana Yablonskaya has joined the prestigious roster of Yamaha artists. Once regarded as "the best kept secret of the Soviet Union," she has received acclaim in more than forty countries, and her recordings have been awarded the Grand Prix du Disque from the International Liszt Society and have been featured by The Book of the Month Club.

Yamaha Artist Oxana Yablonskaya performs with her son, cellist Dmitri Yablonsky.

"Ms. Yablonskaya has been a longtime friend of Yamaha," reports Stan Zielinski, Director of Yamaha Artist Services, Inc. "She has been doing master classes at Yamaha Artist Center in Paris, and using our pianos in recitals throughout Europe. We met at the Fifth International Hamamatsu Competition in Japan in November 2003, where she was a juror. At our recent meeting Oxana agreed to become an Artistic Advisor for Yamaha Artist Services, Inc. in New York, where she will be advising me and coordinating a series of master classes and recitals. Through her many years of teaching at Juilliard and adjudicating piano competitions around the world, she has extensive contacts with many young talents and leading piano educators. I look forward to our future collaboration with such a prominent musical personality."

Born in Moscow, Yablonskaya attended the Moscow Central School for the Gifted under the tutelage of Anaida Sumbatyan, who also taught Vladimir Ashkenazy. She later studied with the legendary Aleksandre Goldenweiser.

Despite being introduced to the Western world through wins at the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition, the Rio de Janeiro Competition and the Vienna Beethoven Competition, she was forced to stay at home as a result of cold war pressures. In 1975, distressed over these restraints, she applied for a U.S. visa and waited more than two years before being allowed to leave with her father and young son, after petitions from such stellar artists as Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Richard Rodgers and Katherine Hepburn. Following her London debut at Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1982, the Daily Telegraph wrote, "Yablonskaya is the sort of pianist who accomplishes with ease and naturalness what others struggle for a lifetime to achieve."

Yablonskaya will be performing on a Yamaha CFIIIS piano at her upcoming recital at New York's Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center on October 14.

To learn more, write Yamaha Corporation of America at P.O. Box 6600, Buena Park, CA 90622-6600; telephone (714) 522-9011; or e-mail infostation@yamaha.com.