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8/17/2008 | Ilya Gringolts, Aleksandar ...

Ilja Gringolts

Excellent Russian violinist Ilya Gringolts entered the history books of violin performance as the youngest ever winner of the International Violin Competition "Premio Paganini" in 1998, when he was 16 years old. He was also the best interpreter of Paganini's Caprices. Mr Gringolts studied violin and composition at the St. Petersburg Special Music School and at the Juilliard School in New York with Itzhak Perlman and Dorothy Delay.

Recent notable highlights include his performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Daniel Barenboim, the UBS Verbier Orchestra with Kurt Masur and Mstislav Rostropovich, the Israel Philharmonic with Zubin Mehta, the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra with Yuri Temirkanov, the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin, the BBC Philharmonic with Vassily Sinaisky at the Proms and the Rotterdam Philharmonic with Vladimir Jurowski. Mr Gringolts' present and forthcoming solo engagements include the Orchestre de Venezuela and Mahler Chamber Orchestra (Claudio Abbado), the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Ilan Volkov), a tour to Germany and Spain with the NDR Hannover (Vasily Petrenko), the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, the Bournemouth Symphony, the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra (Jakub Hrůša), and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Extensive tours have also brought Mr Gringolts to Asia and Australia, where he has performed with the NNC Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Western Australia Symphony Orchestra, Tasmania Symphony Orchestra, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Auckland Philharmonia and in October 2007, he appeared in a gala concert in Osaka to mark the 25th anniversary of the Osaka Symphony Hall.

At solo recitals, he has performed at the Verbier, Lucerne and Colmar Festivals, at the Old Opera House in Frankfurt, the Palace of Music in Valencia, the Beethoven Bonn Festival, at the Louvre in Paris, Wigmore Hall in London, and every year he has received invitations to Milan's Serate Musicali. In June 2008 Mr Gringolts performed the world premiere of Sir Peter Maxwell Davis' new Violin Sonata at the St. Magnus Festival and Cheltenham International Music Festival.

Mr Gringolts has worked with Deutsche Grammophon since 2002, and immediately his first recording – Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D and Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor with the Israel Philharmonic and Itzhak Perlman received rave reviews from music critics. His subsequent compact discs are highly acclaimed, and the recording of Taneyev's chamber music, in which he was joined by Vadim Repin, Nobuko Imai and Mikhail Pletnev, won a Gramophone Award in 2005. Deutsche Grammophon released Gringolts' latest recording in April 2008 - Beethoven's Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano with Alexander Longquish, Mario Brunello and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela directed by Claudio Abbado. In 2008, a recording of Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst violin compositions that Mr Gringolts worked on together with pianist Ashley Wass was released on the Hyperion label.

Mr Gringolts plays a Ruggeri violin loaned to him by Otto Karl Schenk, Bern (Switzerland).

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Aleksandar Madžar

Aleksandar Madžar studied piano in Belgrade, Moscow, Strasbourg and Brussels. In 1996 he was a finalist in the prestigious Leeds Piano Competition. He has performed with a number of orchestras, predominantly from the United Kingdom (including the Royal and BBC Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony) and given recitals at London's Wigmore Hall and at the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall.

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