Galina Stepanovna Maksimova (10 February 1914 – 31 March 2004) was a pianist and concert accompanist. She was born in Simbirsk, Russian Empire, to Kapitolina Eslivanova and Stepan Maksimov, young teachers at the Simbirsk Chuvash Teachers' School. Her childhood and adolescence were spent in Simbirsk and in the Chuvash villages of Koshki-Novotimbayevo and Sredniye Timersyany, where her mother taught.
According to her memoir, On What I Experienced, Maksimova received her first music lessons from her father and at the Puzyrev-Tsentner private music school in Simbirsk. From 1929 to 1935 she studied piano at the Gnesins Music College in Moscow with Yevgenia Gnesina. She graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1940, having studied with Heinrich Neuhaus.
Maksimova gave public concerts in Simbirsk from the age of twelve. In 1929 she accompanied the Chuvash State Choir, with which she performed at the Kremlin in 1936. She and her sister Vera performed in Cheboksary at a republic anniversary concert in 1935, and the two sisters later took part in an evening of Chuvash music at the Gnesins Institute concert hall in Moscow on 5 June 1961.
After graduating, Maksimova worked as a concert accompanist at the Yevgeny Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow and at Aleksandr Tutyshkin's Theatre of Miniatures in Omsk. She was a soloist and accompanist with Mosestrada from 1945 to 1951, then with the Moscow Philharmonic from 1951 to 1969. Her collaborators included Leonid Kogan, Igor Oistrakh, Boris Goldstein, Mstislav Rostropovich, Mark Mikhailov, Elena Chavdar, Valentina Firsova, Yuri Mazurok, Rashid Behbudov, Galina Ulanova, Sofia Golovkina, Raisa Struchkova and Alexander Lapaouri. She toured in Canada, England, Finland, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Germany, Hungary and China.
Maksimova was married to Lev Feigin. From 1988 she lived in London, where she continued to play sonatas by Brahms and Mozart with her husband. She died in London in 2004.
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