Alexander Slobodyanik, a Ukrainian-born pianist who earned stardom in the former Soviet Union with his virtuosity and emotional interpretations of Romantic composers and who has been a concert pianist and in-demand teacher since moving to the United States in 1989, died Sunday in New Jersey. He was 65 and lived in Morristown, N.J.

The cause was infectious meningitis, said Maya Pritsker, the cultural editor of Novoye Russkoye Slovo, a Russian-language daily newspaper in New York City.

Slobodyanik (pronounced slow-buh-DYAH-nik) earned a place, at 15, at the Moscow Central Special Music School, where he studied with Heinrich Neuhaus, and later at the Moscow Conservatory. He was recommended by Sviatoslav Richter to the impresario Sol Hurok, who was visiting Moscow, and Hurok brought him to America.

Slobodyanik made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1968 in a solo recital. The program included sonatas by Mozart and Prokofiev, Liszt’s Sixth Rhapsody and Schumann’s “Carnaval.” It left a critic for The New York Times, Donal Henahan, agog at the young man’s virtuosic technique and fervid playing. “One left persuaded,” he wrote, “that the Soviet Union had sent us no pianist of this caliber since Vladimir Ashkenazy.”

Born and raised in Ukraine, Slobodyanik was a product of the Soviet era. He spoke mostly, if not exclusively, Russian and was devoted, especially in his American years, to Russian composers like Mussorgsky, Scriabin and Shostakovich. He was born in Kiev on Sept. 2, 1942, and grew up mostly in Lviv. His mother was a piano teacher, his father a psychiatrist. Their son, a handsome and personable young man, was a Russian celebrity as a young musician.

“He was a romantic, dreamy person, popular for his looks and for his music,” Pritsker said. “When he was in his 20s and even later, his concerts required policemen to control the crowds.”

For 10 years, Slobodyanik returned to the United States frequently, but in 1979, cultural ties with the Soviet Union were curtailed at the outset of the Afghan war, and he did not appear here again until 1988. He continued to tour in Europe, Asia and Latin America, but the hiatus derailed him on his path to international star status.

He married Laryssa Krupa, an American-born pianist who is also of Ukrainian descent and who first heard her future husband play in the 1970s when she was 13. She survives him, along with a son from his previous marriage, Alex Slobodyanik, also a concert pianist.