Vitaly Starikov

Vitaly Starikov was born into a family of musicians in Yekaterinburg, and his parents had him singing in a children’s music group at three. He entered the Ural Musical School for Gifted Children at seven, made his concerto debut at ten with the Ural State Russian Folk Orchestra, and gave his first recital three years later. He studied at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory with Vera Gornostayeva and Eliso Virsaladze, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there, and in 2026 completed an artist diploma at the Yale School of Music with Boris Berman.

In 2025 he won the silver medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, where his Bartók Second Concerto electrified the hall.

He has played with the Sydney Symphony, the Antwerp and Belgian National Orchestras, the St. Petersburg Symphony and the Pacific Symphony, and in halls from the Sydney Opera House to the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. This season he takes Bach’s complete Art of Fugue on a nine-city tour of the United States with Circa, Australia’s acrobatic troupe.

Critics single out his warm sound and an unassuming presence at the piano, with a “willingness less to play at the audience than to draw [them] into musical intimacies,” as the Dallas Morning News put it. He likes to set familiar music beside lesser-known and new works.