Anna Vinnitskaya makes the piano sing, displaying a soulful intensity and technical brilliance that never becomes an end in itself. “If piano playing was a language”, a critique once wrote, “Anna Vinnitskaya would enter history as a poet”. She never asked herself whether she wanted to become a pianist – the piano was “always there, and it just worked”, explains the winner of the Reine Elisabeth Concours 2007. At the age of 18, Anna Vinnitskaya became a student of Evgeny Koroliov, and seven years later she herself received a professorship at the Hamburg Musikhochschule. From her teacher, she says, she learned “to play with your soul and really take something of yourself and play what you have inside.” Emotional as well as technically refined moments run through her finely selected programme of music by Schumann, Chopin and Ravel. “I want to seek the truth and tell what the composer wanted to express. If I succeed in that, then I am very happy.”