Biographical information for Yuri Blinov

Yuri Blinov was born August 3, 1975 in Minsk, Belarus.  He studied at the State Music College and the Belarusian Academy of Music in the class of professor Ludmila Shelomentseva.  While still a teenager, Yuri won several significant prizes, including third prize at the J. Vitols International Piano Competition in Riga and first prize at the I. Prokofiev International Piano Competition in St. Petersburg.  He also did major concert tours of Russia and Japan.

Other concert engagements took him to the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, China, Belgium and Poland.  He took part in renowned music festivals such as Bonnersommer in Bonn, Germany (1995 and 1997), the Scriabin Anniversary Festival in Moscow (1997) and the Busoni Festival in Bolzano, Italy (2002). He has been a frequent soloist with the Belarus State Symphony and the St Petersburg Philharmonic and has collaborated with many other orchestras of C.I.S. and Europe.

In 2000, Yuri entered the Artist Diploma Program at TCU where he studied for four years with Dr. Tamás Ungár.  During this period, he was a National Winner of the MTNA Collegiate Artist Piano Competition (2001).  He was also the winner of the Chopin International Competition in Corpus Christi (2001) and the Bartok-Kabalevski-Prokofiev Competition in Radford, VA (2002); prizewinner of the international competitions in Hilton Head and New Orleans; a participant in the XIV Chopin Competition in Warsaw and the XI Van Cliburn Competition.  In February 2002, he was invited to play a recital in Salt Lake City that was a part of the cultural program of XIX Winter Olympics Games.

Yuri also has noteworthy experience in the field of composition.  In 1992, he was a prizewinner in the 'Youth Assemblies of Arts' competition in Moscow, while his 'Impromptu and Fugue' was selected to be a commissioned work for the Minsk 2000 International Piano Competition.  Yuri is beginning his study toward a DMA degree at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.

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