Alexander Gilman

Violinist Alexander Gilman has been an important presence on the European scene as a soloist and chamber musician. He is the artistic director of the critically acclaimed LGT Young Soloists. Gilman was born on September 16, 1982, in Bamberg, West Germany. His family was of Russian Jewish background and contained a number of musicians; he started violin lessons at age six and gave his recital debut just a year later at the Gasteig cultural center in Munich. Gilman was one of the last students of the famed American pedagogue Dorothy DeLay and also studied with or attended master classes of Itzhak Perlman, Aaron Roand, Igor Ozim, Akiko Tatsumi, and Zakhar Bron, who became his mentor. He studied with Bron while pursuing a Master's degree at the Zurich University of the Arts and has been on the faculty of that institution since 2010 as Bron's assistant. Gilman won several competitions, the first of which was the Summit Music Competition in New York in 1997. After England's Classic FM proclaimed him "a name to watch" in 2007, he has performed in top concert halls in Germany and elsewhere, including the Philharmonie in Berlin, the Düsseldotf Tonhalle, and the Herkulessaal. The year 2007 also saw Gilman's debut recording on the prestigious Oehms label, featuring music for violin and piano by Brahms, Prokofiev, Wieniawski, and Stephen Foster. In 2013, Gilman co-founded (with Marina Seltenreich) and was named conductor of the LGT Young Soloists, an ensemble of musicians aged 12 to 23 from more than 15 countries. Under Gilman, that group became the world's first youth orchestra signed to the RCA Red Seal label, and it has released three albums on that label with Gilman as conductor. Their first RCA album, Italian Journey, was nominated for an International Classical Music Award. The group's RCA albums include 2018's Nordic Dream: Works for String Orchestra. Gilman and the LGT Young Soloists returned on RCA in 2019 with Souvenir, an album of short pieces, and in 2020, they were heard on the Naxos album Beethoven Recomposed. In 2022, they moved to Philip Glass's Orange Mountain Music label for a recording of Glass's new Symphony No. 14.
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