Maria Grinberg

Maria Grinberg (Russian: Mария Израилевна Гринберг, Marija Israilevna Grinberg) (September 6, 1908 – July 14, 1978), was a Soviet pianist. She was born in Odessa, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. Her father was a Hebrew scholar and her mother taught piano privately. Until the age of 18, Maria took piano lessons from Odessa's noted teacher David Aisberg. Eventually she became a pupil of Felix Blumenfeld (who also taught Vladimir Horowitz) and later, after his death, continued her studies with Konstantin Igumnov at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1935, she won the Second Prize at the Second All-Union Pianist Competition.

Grinberg become a major figure of the Russian piano school. However, in 1937 both her husband and her father were arrested and executed as "enemies of the people". The pianist was fired by the state-run management and got a job as an accompanist of an amateur choreography group. During that time, she occasionally participated in concert performances playing timpani. Somehow, she later was readmitted as a piano soloist. She became a much-sought-after pianist in Moscow, with concerts in Leningrad, Riga, Tallinn, Voronezh, Tbilisi, Baku and other cities all over the Soviet Union.

At the age of 50, after Joseph Stalin died, she was finally allowed to travel abroad. In all, Grinberg went on 14 performing tours - 12 times in the Soviet bloc countries and twice in the Netherlands where she became a nationally acclaimed figure. Critics compared her performances with those of Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, and Clara Haskil.

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