Yuri Rozum

Who is Yuri Rozum?

Yuri Rozum is a Russian-born concert pianist and philanthropist.

Rozum was born to famous musical parents. His father was baritone Alexander Rozum and his mother was Galina Rozhdestvenskaya, conductor of the Russian Academic Folk Choir. Both were recipients of the title of People's Artist of the USSR.

When Rozum was only age seven, his mother discovered that he had perfect absolute and relative pitch, leading to his immediate enrollment in the Central Music School of the Moscow Conservatory where he would later study under Lev Naumov and Yevgeni Malinin, themselves students of Heinrich Neuhaus.

Rozum developed an interest in philosophy by age fourteen, becoming especially interested in the works of the exiled Nikolai Berdyayev. From there, Rozum became extremely spiritual, leading life as an ascetic and, at the risk of his own freedom, immersing himself in the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

In 1975, at the age of twenty-one, Rozum was selected to compete in the Queen Elizabeth Piano Competition in Brussels. Due to political reasons, Soviet authorities denied his visa and almost immediately drafted him into the military where he would be totally separated from performing on piano for eighteen months.