Gilels had perfect pitch, and at the age of five-and-a-half, he began lessons with Yakov Isaakovich Tkach [Wikidata], a piano pedagogue in Odessa.

[6] A quick learner, he was playing all three volumes of Loeschhorn's studies within a few months, and soon afterwards Clementi and Mozart sonatinas.

Under the tutelage of Reingbald, Gilels broadened his range of cultural interests, with a particular aptitude for history and literature.

Subsequently, he was accepted into the class of Heinrich Neuhaus as a postgraduate student at the Moscow Conservatory, and Gilels renewed his commitment to giving concerts.

Two years later, in 1938, both Gilels and Flier participated in the Ysaÿe International Festival (Queen Elisabeth Competition) in Brussels.

[9] During World War II, Gilels entertained Soviet troops with morale-boosting open-air recitals on the frontline, of which film archive footage exists.

[10] In 1945, he formed a chamber music trio with the violinist Leonid Kogan (his brother-in-law) and the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

In 1952, he became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, where his students included Valery Afanassiev, Irina Zaritskaya, Marina Goglidze-Mdivani, Irina Smorodinova (a Laureate of the International Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud piano competition in Paris), Igor Zhukov, Vladimir Blok and Felix Gottlieb.

Gilels was one of the first Soviet artists, along with David Oistrakh, allowed to travel and give concerts in the West.

[4] His British debut was in Coventry in 1951, where he performed alongside Igor Oistrakh, Galina Vischnevskaya, Mark Reizen and the composer Kabalevsky.

[12] However, Danish composer and writer Karl Aage Rasmussen, in his biography of Richter, denies this possibility and contends that it was just a false rumour.

They had a daughter, Elena, a pianist who graduated from Flier’s class at the Moscow Conservatoire, and who performed and recorded with her father.

His interpretations of the central German-Austrian classics formed the core of his repertoire, in particular Beethoven, Brahms, and Schumann; but he was equally illuminative with Scarlatti and 20th-century composers such as Debussy, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev.