Ulugbek Palvanov

Ulugbek Palvanov was born in 1974 in Urgench, in the Khorezm region of Uzbekistan. He began playing the piano at the age of five and attended a specialist music school in Tashkent.

He went on to study at the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan in Tashkent and at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, where his teacher was Professor Lev Naumov. He entered international competitions from a young age; the piano competitions in Bishkek (1990) and Porto (1991) are among those listed in his biographies.

In 1997 he moved on to Germany, studying first at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin with Professor Klaus Bässler and then at the Berlin University of the Arts with Professor Klaus Hellwig. In those years he became a prizewinner at the Busoni Competition in Bolzano (1996), the Tbilisi competition (1997), the Steinway Competition in Berlin (1998), the Robert Schumann Competition in Zwickau (2000), the Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv (2001) and the Arthur Schnabel Competition at the Berlin University of the Arts (2003).

From 2003 to 2005 he taught at the University of Potsdam, in its Institute for Music and Music Education. He has appeared with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, the Bolzano chamber orchestra and the Georgian Philharmonic, and at festivals in the USA, Japan and France. In 2009 he received the Cultural Prize of the Order of St John (Johanniter) for his work in Germany; sources differ on which body awarded it.

Since 2014 he has been artistic director of the Pianowerke concert series in Brandenburg. In May 2018, together with violinist David Yonan, he won a silver medal at the Global Music Awards in Los Angeles in the Ensemble and New Composition categories. He lives in Berlin.