Everything to play for at the Tchaikovsky competition

"British pianist Peter Donohoe is used to being lionised in Moscow. In 1982, Donohoe won the highest prize awarded at the world's most prestigious and controversial classical music talent-show, the Tchaikovsky Competition. Those two words instil sweaty-palmed nervousness and feverish excitement in any musician who's ever competed in Russia, and in anyone who ever watched those grainy broadcasts of the finals that used to beam into our living rooms from the USSR every four years in the 1970s and 1980s. They were messages from another world, visions of an ethereal realm of the brightest and best pianists, violinists, cellists and singers. Donohoe remains a hero in Moscow, and his performances of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto and the "Rach 3", Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto, are still talked about with misty-eyed reverence in the corridors of the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, home of the Tchaikovsky Competition since its first edition in 1958."

For the full story, please see The Guardian.