Vladimir Sofronitsky was born in
St. Petersburg. His father was a physics teacher and his mother came from an artistic family. In 1903, his family moved to
Warsaw, where he started piano lessons with Anna Lebedeva-Getcevich (a student of
Nikolai Rubinstein), and later (at the age of nine) with
Aleksander Michałowski. From 1916 to 1921, Sofronitsky studied in the
Petrograd Conservatory under
Leonid Nikolayev, where
Dmitri Shostakovich,
Maria Yudina, and Elena Scriabina, the eldest daughter of
Alexander Scriabin (who had died in 1915), were among his classmates. He met Scriabina in 1917 and married her in 1920. He had previously expressed a sympathy for Scriabin's piano music—as attested by Yudina—and he now had a greater intellectual and emotional connection to Scriabin's works through his wife and through the Scriabin in-laws. Sofronitsky was also acclaimed as an outstanding pianist by the composer
Alexander Glazunov and the musicologist and critic
Alexander Ossovsky. He gave his first solo concert in 1919, The only other time he performed outside the Soviet Union was at the
Potsdam Conference in 1945, when he was suddenly sent by
Stalin to play for the allied leaders. Sofronitsky taught at the Leningrad Conservatory from 1936 to 1942, and then at the
Moscow Conservatory until his death. He was awarded a
Stalin Prize of the first class in 1943 and proclaimed an
Honoured Artist of the RSFSR in 1942. He gave many performances at the Scriabin Museum in Moscow, especially during the latter part of his career. Sofronitsky made a moderate number of recordings in the last two decades of his life, although fewer than those made by
Sviatoslav Richter and
Emil Gilels, from the younger generation of Soviet pianists. Drawn principally to Romantic repertoire, Sofronitsky recorded a large number of Scriabin's works and also compositions by
Beethoven,
Schubert,
Chopin,
Schumann,
Liszt,
Lyadov,
Rachmaninoff,
Medtner,
Prokofiev, and others. ==Repertoire==