Alexander Kobrin is a Russian pianist. At age five, he enrolled in the Gnessin Special School of Music in Moscow where his primary teacher was Tatiana Zelikman. When he turned eighteen, he enrolled at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, as a student of the legendary teacher, Lev Naumov, and he holds a graduate degree from that institution. As a teenager Kobrin won several youth piano competitions, but he won his first adult competition, the Scottish International Piano Competition when he was 18. The next year, in 1999, he won the Busoni Competition, after several years in which the first prize had not been awarded because no competitor's performances had been deemed worthy. In 2000, the year Yundi Li was the winner, Kobrin was third at the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, and Li says that one of his favorite memories of the competition occurred at the awards ceremony, when Kobrin lifted him in celebration of his victory. Kobrin later tied for second prize, with no first awarded, at Japan's Hamamatsu competition together with Rafal Blechacz. In June 2005 he won the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. [More at Wikipedia]

March 20th, 1980 in Moscow (Age 44)