Leonidas Kavakos, who was born in1967 in Athens, began playing violin at the age of five. He completed his studies with Stelios Kafantaris at the conservatory of his native city and with Josef Gingold at the University of Indiana. In1985 Kavakos won the International Sibelius Competition in Helsinki, and, in 1988, the Naumburg Violin Competition in New York and the Premio Paganini in Genoa. Since then he has performed with many renowned orchestras, such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, where he served as artist-in-residence for the 2011-12 season. He has worked with such conductors as Herbert Blomstedt, Riccardo Chailly, Gustavo Dudamel, Valery Gergiev, Alan Gilbert, Bernard Haitink, and Zubin Mehta. Kavakos has increasingly devoted himself to conducting as well. From 2007 to 2009 he was Artistic Director of the Camerata Salzburg, which he had already been conducting in numerous concerts since 2002 as Principal Guest Artist. Kavakos has also conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Filarmonica della Scala, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. As a chamber musician he has performed with such colleagues as Emanuel Ax, Renaud and Gautier Capuçon, Hélène Grimaud, and Elisabeth Leonskaja. Together with Enrico Pace, he is currently preparing a cycle of all the Beethoven violin sonatas, which they will perform in London and Vienna and also record. His recording of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto won the Echo Klassik Award, while his account of the Sibelius Violin Concerto garnered a Gramophone Award. Leonidas Kavakos plays the “Abergavenny” Stradivarius from 1724.
LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) debut on 29 August 1999 in string trios by Beethoven and Schnittke, together with Kim Kashkashian and Natalia Gutman.
May 2012