Sergei Istomin

Cellist and viola da gamba player Sergei Istomin, educated partly in the U.S., has been active in various countries, including Canada, France, and Belgium. He has recorded for Analekta, Passacaille, and other labels. Istomin was born in the Soviet Union in 1959. He is apparently unrelated to pianist Eugene Istomin. He began studying the cello at age six at Moscow's Gnessin Institute, a music school for gifted children, where he studied with Vera Birina. He remained there through the completion of his bachelor's degree and then went on to the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow for a master's degree, studying with Valentin Feighin. Istomin then moved to the U.S. to study the viola da gamba at the Oberlin Conservatory and the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute; there, his principal teacher was Catharina Meints Caldwell. He wrote a doctoral thesis on Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme. He also had the chance to study with the pioneering Baroque cello and viol player August Wenzinger, who, by that time in his career, accepted few students. Since then, his performing and recording career has been divided between traditional repertory (on a modern cello) and historically oriented works on Baroque cello and viola da gamba. Istomin appeared as a gambist on the Music & Arts album An Hour with C.P.E. Bach in 1999. His solo debut came in 2003 on the Analekta label with Abel, Schenk, Telemann: Solos for viola da gamba. Istomin spent part of his career in Canada and lists his nationalities as Russian, Canadian, and French. Istomin has performed with major early music groups in Europe and North America, including the Anima Eterna Brugge Orchestra, Tafelmusik Orchestra in Canada, and Il Gardellino Ensemble. He has appeared widely at leading European festivals such as the Aix-en-Provence Festival, the Leipzig Bach Festival, and several in Belgium, including the Festival van Vlaanderen. He is a research associate at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Royal Conservatory in Belgium, where he lived as of the early 2020s. Istomin recorded several Romantic cello works for the Passacaille label in the 2010s, including the Variations on a Rococo Theme, Op. 33 (2019). In 2022, he moved to Challenge Classics for a recording of Bach's Sonatas for viola da gamba, BWV 1027-1029.
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