Aleksey Semenenko

Violinist Aleksey Semenenko has appeared in many countries as a recitalist and concerto soloist. He is a fresh representative of the long violin tradition of his home city of Odessa, Ukraine. Semenenko was born in Odessa in 1988. Semenenko's father, a clarinetist in the Odessa Philharmonic Orchestra, pushed his son to follow a musical career, but Semenenko resisted for a time, committing himself fully only after his father's death. After taking up the violin at six, Semenenko studied for 11 years with Zoya Merzalova, also the teacher of Yuri Bashmet. After just a year of studies, he won a children's music competition in Odessa and then played a Vivaldi concerto with the Odessa Philharmonic. In his teens, Semenenko moved to Germany for studies with Zakhar Bron (and later Harold Schoneweg in chamber music) at the Hochschule für Musik Köln. Major breakthroughs came at the Young Concert Artists Auditions in New York in 2012 and the Boris Goldstein International Violin Competition in 2015, both of which Semenenko won; the latter victory brought invitations to perform at the Musical Olympus Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia, and to appear with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra and the Moscow Virtuosi. He also placed second at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 2015. Touring with the Odessa Philharmonic in the U.S., he met sports equipment heir Ed Wilson, who bought him a rare Bernardel violin at an auction. Those showings paved the way to an international career for Semenenko in the late 2010s and early 2020s. In 2018, he made his recording debut with the album Romantic, Brilliant, Imaginative on the Ars Produktion label, featuring music by Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Paganini, and Schubert. He has appeared with such orchestras as the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Seattle Symphony, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. Semenenko has appeared at the Edinburgh, Hay, and Cheltenham Festivals. His recital career includes appearances at some of the top U.S. small halls, including Merkin Hall in New York, Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In 2021, Semenenko moved to the BIS label for the album American Violin Sonatas, on which he was joined by pianist Artem Belogurov.
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