Vadim Repin

"Simply the best, the most perfect violonist I have ever heard" Yehudi Menuhin

Born in Siberia in 1971, Vadim Repin started to play the violin at the age of five and six months later had his first stage performance. At eleven he won the gold medal in all age categories in the Wienawski Competition and gave his recital debuts in Moscow and St Petersburg. In 1985 at fourteen he made his debuts in Tokyo, Munich, Berlin, Helsinki; a year later in Carnegie Hall. Two years later Vadim Repin was the youngest ever winner of the most prestigious and demanding violin competition in the world, the Reine Elisabeth Concours.

Since then he has performed with all the world’s greatest orchestras and conductors. Mr. Repin regularly collaborates with Nikolai Lugansky and Itamar Golan in recital; other chamber music partners include Martha Argerich, Evgeny Kissin and Mischa Maisky. Last season featured concerts with Muti in New York, with Thielemann in Tokyo, with Chailly in Leipzig, an Australian tour with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski, and the unanimously acclaimed première of a violin concerto written for him by James MacMillan and performed with the London Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev. The 2010/11 season features concerts throughout Switzerland, performances in Rome with Temirkanov, Chicago with Muti, Philadelphia and New York’s Carnegie Hall with Dutoit for the American première of the MacMillan concerto, three different programmes in Austria’s Esterházy Palace, and a series of concerts with the Israel Philharmonic under Kurt Masur.

Vadim Repin’s many CDs include prize-winning recordings of the great Russian violin concerti on Warner Classics. His first recording for Deutsche Grammophon featured the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic and Riccardo Muti, coupled with Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata with Martha Argerich; the second, the Brahms Violin Concerto and the Brahms Double Concerto (Truls Mørk, cello) with the Gewandhaus Orchester Leipzig and Riccardo Chailly. This was followed by the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov trios with Mischa Maisky and Lang Lang, which won an

Echo Award, and most recently an acclaimed recital recording with fellow Russian Nikolai Lugansky. In February 2010 he was awarded the Victoire d’Honneur, France’s most prestigious musical award for a lifetime’s dedication to music, and in December he became Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Vadim Repin plays on the 1743 Bonjour violin by Guarneri del Gesù.