Ilya Gringolts

Born in 1982, violinist Ilya Gringolts first studied in his native St. Petersburg before transferring to the Juilliard School in New York, where he was taught for three years by Itzhak Perlman. In 1998 he won the Paganini Competition in Genoa, and from 2001 to 2003 he was a BBC New Generation Artist. Since then he has performed as a soloist with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the NHK Symphony Orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He has devoted himself not only to the great violin concertos of the traditional repertoire but also to new works by Augusta Read Thomas, Michael Jarrell, Bernhard Lang, Beat Furrer, and André Tchaikovsky. Chamber music plays an important role for Gringolts, as his activities playing primarius in the Gringolts Quartet show. He has performed with his quartet at the Salzburg Festival and the Edinburgh Festival, as well as at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, the Philharmonie de Luxembourg, and the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Gringolts has a rich discography that includes Paganini’s 24 Caprices, Stravinsky’s complete works for violin, and violin concertos by Weinberg, Dvořák, Korngold, and John Adams. His most recent recording, released in January 2021, is devoted to Locatelli concertos performed with the Finnish Baroque Orchestra. In 2020, Gringolts and Ilan Volkov co-founded the I&I Foundation, which commissions compositions, to promote contemporary music. He teaches as a professor at the Zurich University of the Arts and at the Accademia Chigiana. Ilya Gringolts plays on a violin built by Stradivari, the “ex Prové” from 1718.

Lucerne Festival debut on 31 August 2006 in the Debut series playing works by Bartók, Bach, and Schumann.

July 2021