Solomiya Ivakhiv

Violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv has worked to popularize Ukrainian music in the U.S., where she is based. She is also an important educator. Ivakhiv was born on April 3, 1980, in Lviv, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union). When she was two, her mother noticed that she could sing melodies back, accurately and in tune, and she was enrolled at six at the Special Music School for Children with Extraordinary Abilities in Lviv. She had planned to study piano, but a teacher suggested that she would do well on the violin instead. Ivakhiv studied at the Lviv Academy of Music and then moved to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, earning an undergraduate degree after studies with Joseph Silverstein, Pamela Frank, and Rafael Druian. Unusually, Ivakhiv divided her training between her home country and the U.S., returning to the Lviv Academy of Music for a master's degree and then earning a doctorate at Stony Brook University on Long Island. Her principal teachers there were Philip Setzer, Ani Kavafian, and Gilbert Kalish. She has maintained contacts in Ukraine, performing there frequently, and in 2021, she was named an Honored Artist of Ukraine by President Volodymyr Zelensky. Even during the early part of the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia, Ivakhiv worked to promote Ukrainian music in the U.S. and, more generally, to assert Ukrainian cultural identity. In 2016, she issued her debut album, Ukraine: Journey to Freedom, on the Labor Records label. Ivakhiv has also performed and recorded Western European repertory, and she has appeared widely in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Her recital and chamber music credits include concerts at such venues as Carnegie Hall, the CBC Glenn Gould Studio, and Tchaikovsky Hall in Kyiv. She has appeared as a concerto soloist with the Istanbul State Symphony in Turkey, the Charleston Symphony in South Carolina, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, and the Hunan Symphony Orchestra in China, among other groups. Ivakhiv has also performed on radio in the U.S., Ukraine, and China. She has recorded for the Brilliant and Centaur labels, recording rare concertos for violin, piano, and orchestra by Mendelssohn, Haydn, and Hummel with pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi. In 2022, she issued the recital album Poems and Rhapsodies on Centaur. In 2024, she returned on Naxos with the album Ukrainian Masters: Kosenko, Skoryk, Bortkiewicz, a collection of violin sonatas on which she was accompanied by Steven Beck. Ivakhiv is chair of the strings department at the University of Connecticut and has also taught at the Longy School of Music at Bard College in New York.
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