Ekaterina Novitskaya

Ekaterina Novitskaya-Hervy, née Ekaterina Novitskaya (or Yekaterina Novitskaya, ; born 24 October 1951), is a Russian pianist, now living in Belgium.

Biography Born in Moscow, Russia, Novitskaya started playing piano at the age of 4. Having demonstrated promise, at 6 she enrolled in the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory's Central Music School for gifted children, where she studied for eight years in Evgeny Timakin's piano class. Then she continued under the tutelage of Lev Oborin.

In 1968, at the age of 16, she won the Belgian Queen Elisabeth Competition, becoming its first female winner in the piano department. Billboard wrote in its review: "This LP shows why [Novitskaya won the top prize in 1968 Queen Elizabeth contest]. She's only 17 but has the skill, technique and determination, as evidenced here, to make it all the way." The New York Times applauded her "burnished precision", "flair" and "imagination". There were also positive reviews in magazines like High Fidelity and Stereo Review. Stereo Review marked Novitskaya's performance as "stunning". "Against the stiff recorded competition of Richter, Rubinstein, and Sandor, Novitskaya manages to do better than just hold her own in her performance of Visions," wrote one of the reviewers.

In 1978, Novitskaya emigrated from the Soviet Union to marry Belgian François-Emmanuel Hervy, whom she first met back in 1968 during the Queen Elisabeth Competition that she won. The New York Times published a cautious review, stating that Novitskaya "didn't make a strong impression" and that "(knowing of her earlier successes) one began speculating on reasons". The reviewer stated that "she showed good basic technical proficiency", but employed "some cautious tempos" and "it was hard to account for the static quality of her phrasing."