Alexandra Conunova

Beginning before she was ten years old, violinist Alexandra Conunova won a series of important prizes. She has parlayed them into a career with international dimensions. Conunova was born in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau on November 16, 1988, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. She began playing the violin at age six and won her first major prize in 1997, taking top honors at the Remember Enescu Competition in Bucharest, Romania. Conunova moved to Rostock, Germany, after winning a scholarship there, and went on to the Hannover University for Music, Drama and Media, studying with Krzysztof Wegrzyn. Several more major prizes boosted Conunova's career, including first prize at the Joseph Joachim Violin Competition in Hannover in 2012 and third prize at the Tchaikovsky Violin Competition in Moscow in 2015, a year in which the first prize was not awarded. The following year, Conunova was awarded the Borletti-Buitoni Trust fellowship in London. She has continued to study with Edouard Wulfson in Geneva. She has appeared as a soloist with such top orchestras as the Mariinsky Orchestra in St. Petersburg under Valery Gergiev, France's Insula Orchestra, and the Moscow Philharmonic, with which she toured Japan. Conunova has appeared at such prestigious festivals as the Montreux Septembre Musicale in Switzerland, the Verbier Festival, and the Aix-en-Provence Easter Festival. Her chamber music partners include pianist Michail Lifits, violinist Renaud Capuçon, and cellist Edgar Moreau. In 2019, Conunova was heard on the Insula Orchestra's recording of Beethoven's Triple Concerto, Op. 56. She has recorded the Prokofiev violin sonatas with Lifits, and in 2020, she made her solo debut, releasing a performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons violin concertos on the Aparte label. She plays the Guadagnini violin ex "Ida Levin" "on a kind loan from a music lover."
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