Nikolai Suk is a Soviet and Ukrainian pianist and music teacher. He was born on December 21, 1945, in Kyiv, into a family of musicians. He studied at the Mykola Lysenko Kyiv Secondary Specialized Music School and later at the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Professor Lev Vlasenko.
He became a prize winner of the International Liszt-Bartok Competition and was named Honored Artist of the Ukrainian SSR in 1973. He gained worldwide recognition in 1971 at the International Liszt-Bartok Competition in Budapest, where he won the gold medal.
Performing both classical and contemporary music, Suk gave premieres of concertos and solo works by composers including Valentyn Sylvestrov, Ivan Karabyts, Myroslav Skoryk, and Virko Baley. Some of these works were written especially for him. The American musicologist and former New York Times music critic Joseph Horowitz called him "the most outstanding of contemporary performers of Liszt's music."
After his American debut at Carnegie Hall in 1991, Suk performed in Europe and the United States. In Chicago, for example, he gave the premiere of Alfred Schnittke's Concerto for Piano and Strings.
In the late 1990s he took part in a triumphant concert tour with the National Honored Academic Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine in Austria and Germany. In a duo with the distinguished Ukrainian violinist Oleh Krysa, a student of David Oistrakh, he performed the complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas.
Suk has lived in Las Vegas, where he has taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has also served as artist-in-residence and artistic director of the Ukrainian Institute of America. He has repeatedly been a member of the jury of the International Competition for Young Pianists in Memory of Vladimir Horowitz in Kyiv.
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