YURI BASHMET

“Without any doubt, one the best living musicians” (The Times).  
  
Born in 1953 in Rostov in the Ukraine, Yuri Bashmet was 18 years old when he started to attend the viola class at the Tchiakovsky Conservatory in Moscow, first under the guidance of Vadim Borisovskij – violinist in the Beethoven Quartet, and then under Fedor Druzhinin.

Realising that their pupil had extraordinary talent, his teachers took great pains over his training.  In 1975 Bashmet won the Budapest International Competition and in the following  year he got first prize in the Monaco International Competition; from here his impressive international career took off, favoured by his prodigious sound, great control of the bow and exquisite sensibility.

As a soloist, Yuri Bashmet has played with some of the world’s leading orchestras, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, the French National Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the Boston, Chicago, Washington, Montreal, Paris Orchestras, the Danish Radio Symphonic Orchestra, those of Oslo and Helsinki and with many notable conductors: Kubelik, Davis, Giulini, Rostropovich, Solti, Jansons, Dutoit, Plasson, Gergiev, Bychkov. His playing was the reference point for the series of concerts held by the London Symphonic Orchestra at the Barbican Centre Hall.  Yuri Bashmet has been the first solo artist to play the viola in many different prestigious concert halls all over the world.

There have been many performances with Svjatoslav Richter and other exceptional artists such as Isaac Stern, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Natalia Gutman and the Borodin Quartet.

Yuri Bashmet’s extraordinary talent has inspired thirty or so musicians to compose works which have become an important contribution to enriching the viola’s repertoire.  Particularly fertile is the musical association between Bashmet and Alfred Schnittke, who in 1986 dedicated to Bashmet a concerto for viola.  This work was first interpreted by Bashmet in France at the Music week in Tours.

In September  1990 he played a world premiere of the “Concerto for Viola” at the Berlin Festival.  A work written for him by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli.  More recently he played with Mstislav Rostropovich and Gidon Kremer the “Triple Concerto” written for them by Alfred Schnittke.

Bashmet has a contract with the RCA Victor and Sony Classical record company and has made many records together with the pianist Mikhail Muntian and with his new orchestra the Moscow Soloists, which was founded in 1992, he has also recorded with other famous artists.

In January 1992 and again in January 1994 the Clasical Musical Awards named him the “best instrumentalist of the year”.  In April 1995 he won the prestigious international prize of the Sonings Foundation for music in Copenhagen, a prize previously awarded to composers such as Stravinskij, Bernstein, Britten, Shostakovic, Menuhin, Boulez and Richter.

Informations: Consorzio Elba Promotion, 
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