Ilya Gringolts

Despite his young age, Ilya Gringolts has a lot of musical experience to draw upon. After studying violin with Tatiana Liberova and composition with Jeanna Metallidi in Petersburg, he attended the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied with Itzhak Perlman. Winner of the 1998 International Violin Competition “Premio Paganini” in Genoa, where he was also awarded two special prizes: for the youngest first prize winner in the history of the competition, and for 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 the world’s leading orchestras such as the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, BBC Scottish Symphony, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. He has undertaken extensive tours of China with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, of Germany and Spain – with the NDR Radiophilharmonie from Hanover and of Japan – with the NHK Orchestra. He was invited to take part in renowned and prestigious music festivals in Lucerne, Kuhmo, Colmar, Bucharest, Milan, Monte Carlo, London (Wigmore Hall, BBC Proms) and Petersburg.

His repertoire runs the gamut of music from the baroque to contemporary. He has to his name premiere performances of works by Peter Maxwell Davies, Augusta Read Thomas, Christophe Bertrand and Michael Jarrell. He also collaborates with numerous other composers. He frequently gives solo recitals and regularly appears as a chamber musician together with such artists as Yuri Bashmet, Lynn Harrell, Diemut Poppen, Vladimir Mendelssohn and Itamar Golan. In 2008, he also founded the Gringolts String Quartet.

After numerous highly praised CD recordings for Deutsche Grammophon and Hyperion, Ilya Gringolts dedicated his two successive CD releases to the music of Robert Schumann: the Violin Sonatas Nos. 1-3 with Peter Laul (2010) and the Piano Trios with Dmitry Kouzov and Peter Laul (2011). He won a Gramophone Award in 2006 for his CD Taneyev – Chamber Music with Vadim Repin, Nobuko Imai, Lynn Harrell and Mikhail Pletnev.

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