Michail Gantvarg

Distinguished violinist, Music Director of the "Soloists of Saint-Petersburg" Chamber Ensemble. Professor of the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory of Saint-Petersburg Michail Gantvarg, a leading violinist of St.Petersburg for the last few decades, is a very noticeable and original person in the music life of the city. He has passed through quite a typical way for a modern artist. After winning a first prize at the Paganini International Competition in his youth, he was combining an intensive concert work together with being a principal violin in the St.Petersburg Philarmony Symphonic Orchestra directed by Yury Temirkanov. Together with that, he has started his teaching career in the St.Petersburg State Conservatory. To the time of the Ensemble was created, M. Gantvarg was already a mature and well-known artist with his own creative outlook and performance style. He is one of the last successors of the legendary St.Petersburg violin school, which gave birth to a whole "constellation" of world famous violinists Trying to keep its best traditions, M. Gantvarg is always in the search of new ways of ex-pression, sometimes coming to non-traditional, even paradoxical performance solutions. His generous and "classic" playing manner, is combined with the creative freedom and improvising bits and total absence of routine.