Born in St Petersburg, Arcadi Volodos initially studied singing and conducting at the conservatory there, before devoting himself entirely to the piano. He continued his pianistic training at the Moscow Conservatory with Galina Egiazarova, as well as in Madrid and Paris.
Since making his New York debut in 1996, Arcadi Volodos has worked with the world’s leading orchestras, including the New York, Berlin, Israel and Munich Philharmonics, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra, Zurich, and the Boston and Chicago Symphony Orchestras. He has performed under conductors such as Semyon Bychkov, Riccardo Chailly, Myung-Whun Chung, Christoph Eschenbach, Valery Gergiev, Paavo Järvi, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa and Jukka-Pekka Saraste.
Solo recitals play a central role in his career. His repertory includes the major works by Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Skryabin, Prokofiev and Ravel, alongside less widely performed pieces by composers such as Federico Mompou, Ernesto Lecuona and Manuel de Falla. He is a regular guest at the most prestigious concert halls and at the most famous festivals worldwide.
Highlights of the 2025/26 season include(d) performances at the Barbican Centre in London, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Victoria Hall in Geneva, the Zurich Tonhalle, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, the Prinzregententheater in Munich, the Auditorio Nacional de Música in Madrid, La Scala, Milan, and at the Festival international de Piano de la Roque d’Anthéron, the Ruhr Piano Festival and the Salzburg Festival.
Since the Gramophone Award-winning recording of his debut recital live from Carnegie Hall, released by Sony Classical in 1999, many of Arcadi Volodos’s recordings have won international awards. Early recordings included the groundbreaking albums Volodos Piano Transcriptions, Volodos Live at Carnegie Hall and Volodos in Vienna. Albums since then have included live performances with the Berlin Philharmonic of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, conducted by James Levine, and Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, conducted by Seiji Ozawa, the albums Volodos Plays Liszt (2007) and Volodos Plays Mompou (2013), which won a Gramophone Award and an ECHO Klassik Award, Volodos Plays Brahms (2017), which won the Edison Klassiek, the Diapason d’Or and a Gramophone Award, and Volodos Plays Schubert (2019), which again won the Edison Klassiek. In May 2026 he released his most recent recording with Sony Classical: a live performance from Paris featuring Schubert’s Piano Sonata in D major D. 850 and Schumann’s Kinderszenen.
