Ilya Gringolts | Violin

Despite his young age, Ilya Gringolts has a lot of musical experience to draw upon. After studying violin and composition in Saint Petersburg with Tatiana Liberova and Jeanna Metallidi, he attended the Juilliard School, where he studied with Itzhak Perlman. Winner of the 1998 International Violin Competition “Premio Paganini”, he was also awarded two special prizes for the youngest first prize winner in the history of the competition and the best interpreter of Paganini’s Caprices. He was also one of twelve young artists selected by the BBC for their New Generation Artists Programme.

In recent years, Ilya Gringolts has performed all over Europe, Asia, North America and Australia as well as South Africa and Israel with leading orchestras such as the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, BBC Scottish Symphony, Royal Scottish Orchestra, Sao Paulo Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Saint Petersburg Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. He has undertaken extensive tours to China with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, to Germany and Spain with the NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover and to Japan with the NHK Orchestra, just to name a few.

Ilya Gringolts is also in great demand as a recitalist. His repertoire runs the gamut from baroque to contemporary. In summer 2010 he performed the complete cycle of the Bach sonatas for violin and cembalo with Masaaki Suzuki at the Verbier Festival. He has a continued commitment to period instrument performances and often plays baroque repertoire with a baroque violin and bow, sometimes switching between modern and baroque violin in a single program. He has also worked with many contemporary composers and has premiered works by Peter Maxwell Davies, Augusta Read Thomas, Christophe Bertrand and Michael Jarrell. He is a regular guest at the fesivals in Lucerne, Kuhmo, Colmar, Bucarest, Milano, Monte Carlo and at the BBC Proms, Wigmore Hall and the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic.

As a chamber musician, he regularly works together with artists such as Yuri Bashmet, Lynn Harrell, Diemut Poppen, Vladimir Mendelssohn and Itamar Golan. In 2008, he also founded the Gringolts Quartet. After numerous highly praised CD recordings for Deutsche Grammophon and Hyperion, Ilya Gringolts dedicated himself to Robert Schumann with his three most recent CD releases on the label Onyx: the violin sonatas no. 1-3 with Peter Laul (2010), the piano trios with Dmitry Kouzov and Peter Laul (2011) as well as the string quartets and the piano quintet with the Gringolts Quartet and Peter Laul (2011). He won a Gramophone Award in 2006 for his CD Taneyev - Chamber Music with Mikhail Pletnev, Vadim Repin, Nobuko Imai and Lynn Harrell. A recording of Niccolò Paganini’s twenty-four caprices is planned to be published with Onyx in 2013.

In the current season, Ilya Gringolts will appear with a solo recital in Korea and as soloist in Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No.1 with the RSO Stuttgart. His Gringolts Quartet will premiere a new piece by Jens Joneleit at the Kasseler Musiktage.

Besides his position as professor of violin at the Hochschule Basel, he is also a Violin International Fellow at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow.

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