Andrei Hoteev was a Russian pianist, pedagogue, and music researcher. He was born on 2 December 1946 in Leningrad and died on 28 November 2021. From 1993 he lived in Germany.
Hoteev began studying piano at the age of five. He graduated with honors from the Leningrad Conservatory in 1971, where he studied with Professor Nathan Perelman, and later completed postgraduate training at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory in 1985 under Professor Lev Naumov. He made his debut in 1983 in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.
His performing style was deeply influenced by creative meetings with Sviatoslav Richter in Saint Petersburg in June 1985 and with Alfred Schnittke in Hamburg in 1992. In 1990, on the recommendation of Valery Gergiev, he gave concerts at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Germany. In 1991 he made his Hamburg debut with a program dedicated to the centenary of Sergei Prokofiev. His first European tour followed in 1993, with appearances in Russia, Germany, England, Belgium, and Spain; the same year he recorded his first compact disc in France and moved with his family to Hamburg.
A central part of Hoteev’s career was his work on original manuscript versions of major Russian works. In September 1993 he gave the first London performance of the manuscript version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. In October 1993 Leningrad Television broadcast from the Grand Hall of the Saint Petersburg Philharmonia his performance of the manuscript version of Tchaikovsky’s Third Piano Concerto in its three-movement form, presenting him both as soloist and music researcher.
In November 1996, over two evenings in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, Hoteev became the first performer to present the complete cycle of all three Tchaikovsky piano concertos in their unabridged authorial versions, supplemented by the Concert Fantasia for piano and orchestra, Op. 56. This project, performed with the Tchaikovsky Large Symphony Orchestra under Vladimir Fedoseyev, resulted from many years of joint research with the Tchaikovsky Museum in Klin and received international recognition. Two years later, the full program of Tchaikovsky’s works for piano and orchestra, expanded with Gypsy Melodies and the Allegro in C minor, was recorded and issued in Germany on three CDs.
In 2000, in the Grand Hall of the Saint Petersburg Philharmonia, Hoteev performed for the first time the original version of Tchaikovsky and Sophie Menter’s Fantasy Gypsy Melodies for piano and orchestra, based on an unknown Tchaikovsky manuscript discovered by the art historian Polina Vaidman. In 2006 he realized a color-music project in Hamburg: after reconstructing from archival sources Wassily Kandinsky’s light-visual score for Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and the light part in Scriabin’s Prometheus, he performed these works with light together with the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra under Andrey Boreyko, combining the roles of soloist and lighting director.
In 2012 Hoteev performed in Germany with conductor Thomas Sanderling and the Novosibirsk Philharmonic Orchestra the manuscript version of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra, having corrected more than one hundred errors that had entered all published editions of the work at the composer’s request. In 2014, as a result of his research, he made a new recording in Munich of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition for Berlin Classics, based on the original manuscript preserved in the Russian National Library in Saint Petersburg. He documented major deviations from the original found in nearly all printed editions. Western critics praised the recording’s expressive power, dynamic range, color, and conviction; the disc was nominated for the 2014 German Record Critics' Award, and in January 2015 he received the French 5 Diapason award.
Hoteev also collaborated with many conductors and singers, including Vladimir Fedoseyev, Thomas Sanderling, Eri Klas, Pavel Kogan, Robert Holl, Anja Silja, and Elena Pankratova. He was married to the pianist Olga Hoteeva, with whom he recorded in 2012 twenty-two previously unknown four-hand piano transcriptions by Sergei Rachmaninoff from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty. Among his recordings are Tchaikovsky’s piano works and concertos, Russian songs by Rachmaninoff and Mussorgsky, works by Wagner, Prokofiev, and Scriabin, and the album Pure Mussorgsky based on original manuscripts.