Marina Mdivani is a Soviet and Georgian pianist, born on 6 October 1936 in Tbilisi. She is the daughter of Viktor Goglidze, the first Georgian chess master. In 1976 she was named People's Artist of the Georgian SSR.
She graduated in 1955 from the special music school attached to the Tbilisi Conservatory, where she studied with Evgenia Chernyavskaya. She then continued her education at the Moscow Conservatory and in postgraduate study there, working with Yakov Milstein and Emil Gilels.
Early in her career, Mdivani won second prize at the young performers' competition held within the Youth and Students Festival in Moscow in 1957. In 1960 she was supposed to take part in the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, but according to her official website, she was forbidden to travel for political reasons. In 1961 she won the Marguerite Long International Piano Competition in Paris, and in 1962 she received fourth prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
In 1963 Mdivani made her Carnegie Hall debut in New York, with Sol Hurok producing her North American tour. A reviewer in The New York Times described the concert as brilliant and wrote that she had the makings of a great pianist. In the following years she toured widely around the world, appearing in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Turkey, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Morocco, Chile, Peru, Jamaica, and Mexico.
A notable event in her performing career took place on 24 January 1986 in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, where she played all five of Sergei Prokofiev's piano concertos in a single program. Since 1991 she has lived and worked in Canada and has been a professor at McGill University. She has also collaborated with the Vladimir Spivakov Charitable Foundation and helped young Georgian musicians.
Mdivani's repertoire covers a wide range of music, from Johann Sebastian Bach to Paul Hindemith and Alfred Schnittke. Sofia Gubaidulina dedicated her early Chaconne for piano of 1963 to Mdivani, and Mdivani gave its first performance on 13 March 1966. Her recordings include Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto with the Colonne Orchestra under Pierre Dervaux, Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto under Gennady Rozhdestvensky, and Otar Taktakishvili's First Piano Concerto conducted by the composer.