Frederick Kempf came to national prominence in 1992 when he won the BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition. In 1998, his award of third, rather than first, prize in the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow provoked protests from the audience and an outcry in the Russian press, which proclaimed him "the hero of the competition". His international career was rapidly established and his unprecedented popularity with Russian audiences has since been reflected in numerous sold-out concerts and television broadcasts. A committed recitalist, Freddy has appeared on many of the world’s most important stages including, most recently, the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, the Berlin Konzerthaus, Milan’s Conservatorio’s Sala Verdi, the Sociedad Filharmónica Bilbao, London’s Cadogan Hall, Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, the ABC Southbank in Brisbane and Sydney’s City Hall.

The Urals Academic Philharmonic Orchestra was founded in 1936. Since 1995 it has been directed by Dmitry Liss, a representative of the Moscow conducting school and a graduate of Dmitri Kitayenko’s class at the Moscow Conservatoire. Each season the ensemble presents over seventy programmes and more than one hundred concerts. They have recorded some twenty CDs, including releases with Warner Classics International and Mirare. Outside Russia the general management of the orchestra is overseen by the agency Les Productions Internationales Albert Sarfati (France). Over the years, the orchestra has collaborated with the conductors Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Krzysztof Penderecki, Mikhail Pletnev, Vladimir Fedoseyev, Dmitri Kitayenko, Valery Gergiev, Andrey Boreyko, Klaus Tennstedt, Jean-Claude Casadesus, Mitsueshi Inoe, Fabio Mastrangelo, Daniel Raiskin and Eliahu Inbal and the soloists Mstislav Rostropovich, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Boris Berezovsky, Denis Matsuev, Freddy Kempf, Nikolai Lugansky, Yuri Bashmet, Nikolai Petrov, Vadim Repin, Sergei Krylov, Eliso Virsaladze, Natalia Gutman, Liana Isakadze, Peter Donohue, Olga Borodina.