Oxana Yablonskaya

Oxana Yablonskaya (b. 6 December 1938, Moscow) is a renowned Soviet-American pianist and music educator, ex-wife of oboist Albert Zayonts (1936—2014) and mother of cellist Dmitry Yablonsky (b. 1962), who has lived and worked in Israel since 2014, currently teaching at Jerusalem Academy Of Music And Dance. Yablonskaya is the Juilliard School's Professor Emeritus, where she taught between 1983 and 2009. Yablonskaya attended the Moscow Central Music School and took private lessons with [a3106937] and Dmitri Bashkirov before enrolling in the Moscow Conservatory, where Oxana studied with [a1088746]. Yablonskaya began teaching at the Conservatory after graduating in 1962 and earned her Ph.D. degree in 1965. Oxana Yablonskaya gained recognition after winning several prestigious international contests, including the 1963 Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition in Paris, the Rio de Janeiro Piano Competition in 1965, and the Vienna Beethoven Competition in 1969. She was the Moscow State Academic Philharmonia soloist and toured extensively across the USSR. Yablonskaya released a few solo albums on Melodiya and performed with the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, among other notable ensembles. By the early 1970s, as antisemitic sentiment grew stronger in the Soviet Union, Oxana was fired from Moscow Conservatory and banned from performing in the capital and other major cities due to her Jewish origins. In 1975, Oxana Yablonskaya applied for expatriation visas for her family to leave for Israel. After two years of waiting and letters of support from Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim sent to the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they finally received exit visas. In 1977, Yablonskaya and her family moved to New York, where Oxana spent over thirty years. In November 2014, she expatriated to Israel, settling in Jerusalem circa 2016.