Andre Volkonsky was born in 1933 into a Russian family of emigres living in Geneva. Having studied piano with J. Aubert and Dinu Lipatti, he returned to Moscow with his parents at the age of 14 in the hope that the Stalinist regime would restore democracy in the post-war Soviet Union. Volkonsky studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory. When he left the Soviet Union in 1973 to live in France, he had become a much-sought-after harpsichordist, but he had also suffered a lot from the "ideological purge".