As part of the enormous ARTE “europiano” project for the 2026 Fête de la Musique, pianist Anna Vinnitskaya joins the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Aziz Shokhakimov, in a performance of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.
The pianist Paul Wittgenstein commissioned this concerto after losing his right arm during World War I. His considerable financial inheritance allowed Wittgenstein to commission left-hand works from leading composers of the day, including Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, Britten, Korngold, and Paul Hindemith.
Paul Wittgenstein (© BFMI)
The Ravel concerto premiered on 5 January 1932, with Wittgenstein as the soloist and Robert Heger conducting the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. After disagreements over orchestration and the soloist’s role, Wittgenstein introduced the concerto to Paris on 17 January 1933, with Ravel conducting the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris.
Maurice Ravel
Anna Vinnitskaya plays Ravel: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand
Available until 21/06/2027
From Prodigy to Prizewinner
Anna Vinnitskaya (Photo by Johan Jacobs)
Pianist Anna Vinnitskaya was born in Novorossiysk, Russia, and began taking piano lessons at age 6. She first studied with Sergei Osipenko at the Rachmaninoff Conservatory in Rostov-on-Don, then at the Hochschule für Musik und Theatre in Hamburg with Evgeni Koroliov.
She entered the competition circuit at the age of 13, initially winning first prize at the 3rd International Youth Competition in Moscow in 1996. She followed with third place at the Monza Competition in 2000, and just two years later took first place at the Jaén Competition, also winning the Audience Award.
In 2004, she won the Elise Meyer Competition in Hamburg, and in 2005 she took fourth prize in the Ferruccio Busoni International Competition in Bolzano. As only the second woman in the competition’s history, Vinnitskaya took first prize in the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition in Brussels in 2007.
Throughout the multi-round competition, she presented a diverse, virtuosic programme that included the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto as her final showcase. Her Prokofiev performance received high marks, and her victory marked the beginning of her international career. She has since been invited to become a distinguished jury member for this competition.
The Illusion of Two Hands
Vinnitskaya has performed the Ravel Left-Hand Concerto throughout the 2025–26 season, and she has a strong personal connection to the piece. In a 2025 interview with Die Presse, when asked about an opportunity to step in for Yuja Wang, she explained that the Ravel was one of her favourite concertos. The reason may lie in the jazz-influenced, swaggering rhythms and passages that move somewhere between the concert hall and the dance studio.
In a contemporary review of her performance, a November 2025 review by the Hamburger Abendblatt describes her crossing the keyboard over enormous distances with the left hand alone, moving from delicate lyrical passages to extremely rapid runs. The reviewer suggests that, with eyes closed, it became difficult to believe that only one hand was playing.
To be sure, watching her play is just as fascinating as listening. The left hand takes possession of the entire keyboard, plucking bass notes and leaping across enormous distances. Ravel’s genius was to write a concerto that at times seems to play the melody, the accompaniment, and the inner voices simultaneously.
There is always the danger with this piece that it can become a circus trick, the magic of the ear hearing what moves too fast for the eyes to see. However, Vinnitskaya makes easy work of all the technical difficulties. The result is a performance that lets you forget about the missing hand, and you hear only the music.
Beyond the Left Hand
Aziz Shokhakimov (Photo by Mischa Blank)
Uzbek-born conductor Aziz Shokhakimov has been Music Director and Artistic Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg since 2021. Founded in 1855, it is one of France’s oldest symphony orchestras and maintains a distinctive French-German tradition. In this case, the orchestra recreates the orchestral world that Ravel had created around the solitary left hand.
The ARTE performance is part of a wider “europiano” programme, which brought together eleven piano concertos from eleven European cities on 21 June 2026. In Vinnitskaya’s hands, it is no longer a concerto “for the left hand,” but simply a great piano concerto.
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Anna Vinnitskaya plays Ravel: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand
