Valeriy Sokolov is a Russian (Ukrainian) violinist born (in Kharkiv) on
September 22, 1986. He has a very busy
concert career and he tours throughout Europe regularly. He is known for having a highly personal (and
distinctive) style of playing. He began
his studies in his native Ukraine but left at age thirteen (1999) upon
receiving a scholarship (from the Sarasate violin competition) to study in
England with Natalya Boyarskaya. He
began his violin studies in Kharkiv at age five but I do not know who his first
teachers were. He later studied with
Felix Andrievsky and in Germany and Vienna with (among others) Ana Chumachenco,
Mark Lubotsky, and Boris Kuschnir. By
2006, his career was firmly established.
He was barely 20 years old. Sokolov
is particularly well known for his interpretation of Bartok’s second concerto
which he has recorded. He made his U.S.
debut in 2007. Sokolov is the subject of
a 2004 documentary about his emerging career.
Here is a short YouTube video of him playing Beethoven. Photo is courtesy of Derry Moore.
Vilde Frang (Vilde Frang Bjaerke) is a Norwegian violinist and teacher
born (in Oslo) on August 19, 1986. She
is known for having successfully made the jump from child prodigy to mature
violin superstar. That transition does
not always prove successful for artists.
In addition to being technically brilliant, her playing has been
described as being fresh, seductive, sinewy, inspired, voluptuous, and
possessed of startling emotional sincerity. A highly regarded music critic went so far as to say that he had never heard such a great violinist since the late Jascha Heifetz. Her playing is rhythmically and tonally flexible, not straight-laced,
predictable, and pedantic. She began her
violin studies at age four, on a violin built by her father, a professional
bass player. By 1993, she was a student
at the Barratt Due Institute of Music (founded in 1927) in Oslo. She was 7 years old. Her teachers there were Stephan Barratt Due,
Alf Kraggerud, and Henning Kraggerud. Frang
made her public debut at age ten with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra (some
sources say Norwegian Chamber Orchestra.)
She graduated from the Barratt Due Institute in 2002. In 1999, aged 12 (or 13), she debuted with
the Oslo Philharmonic, playing Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy. Mariss Jansons was on the podium. The concert was a great success and her career
took off after that. However, from 2003
to 2009, Frang studied further with Kolja Blacher at the Advanced School for
Music and Theatre in Hamburg and with Ana Chumachenco at the Kronberg Academy
in Kronberg (about ten miles from Frankfurt, Germany.) She debuted with the London Philharmonic in
2007. Her first album was released in
2009. She records exclusively for
EMI/Warner Classics and has received numerous awards for her recordings,
including the Diapason d’Or, Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, Classical BRIT, and
the ECHO Klassik Award. As far as I
know, Frang has never entered any violin competitions. In 2010, Frang received an award of 1 million
NOK (Norwegian Krone – about 175,000 U.S. dollars) from a large Norwegian
business enterprise. She also received
an award of 75,000 Swiss francs (approximately 79,000 U.S. dollars) from Credit
Suisse (international bank) in 2012. The
award included a performance with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Lucerne
Festival. She made her BBC London Proms
debut in August, 2013, playing Bruch’s first concerto. She was 26 years old. By now, Frang has played with virtually every
major orchestra in the world and been accompanied by most major
conductors. She has also played recitals
or made solo appearances in all of the world’s important venues, including
those in China, Japan, Korea, Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany,
Holland, Switzerland, Russia, and the U.S.
Frang now teaches at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo. One of her violins is one constructed in 1864
by J.B. Vuillaume, a maker not considered to have the status of a Guarneri, a
Stradivari, or even a Guadagnini. She
has also played (since the summer of 2013) the 1709 Stradivarius known as the Engleman Strad. Frang has made the following interesting
comment regarding her artistic perspectives: “I need things to worry
about. I need some resistance and
struggle. That’s part of my music
making. I think talent has a lot to do
with knowing how to be inspired. Inspiration
is really the most important thing. ” On April 1 and 2, 2015 (last week) Frang was
to have played the Korngold concerto with the Toronto Symphony (and James
Conlon) but had to cancel due to “scheduling difficulties.” What that really means is anyone’s guess
since concerts are scheduled (and contracts are signed) very far in advance
(sometimes three years in advance) in order to avoid this sort of
difficulty. Perhaps all it means is that
her concert managers are disorganized, although that is extremely unlikely. Here is a YouTube video of one of her
performances. Photo is courtesy of Marco
Borggreve, photographer of (mostly European) musicians.
Arabella Steinbacher is a German violinist (and pianist, as were Fritz Kreisler, Arthur Grumiaux, Louis Persinger, and as is Julia Fischer) born (in Munich) on November 14, 1981. She is now in the forefront of concert violinists performing all over the world. She began studying the violin with Helge Thelen at the age of three. He was her teacher for six years. At age nine, she became the youngest violin student of Ana Chumachenko at the Munich Academy of Music. She received further musical inspiration and guidance from Ivry Gitlis, one of the oldest living concert violinists (among whom are also Zvi Zeitlin, Camilla Wicks, Ida Haendel, Robert Mann, David Nadien, Albert Markov, Abram Shtern, and Ruggiero Ricci.) In 2001, she was awarded a scholarship by the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation. She made her debut in March, 2004, in Paris, playing the Beethoven violin concerto, actually stepping in at the last moment for an indisposed violinist. She was 22 years old. Many other artists have begun their careers in similar fashion – Leonard Bernstein and Shlomo Mintz come to mind. Steinbacher made her New York recital debut in June, 2006. She has also already appeared with most major orchestras in the world – the New York Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic are the exceptions. Steinbacher has recorded extensively and many videos of her playing can be found on YouTube. One such can be found here. She received the German Record Critics Award in 2005 for her recording of both of Darius Milhaud’s rarely-heard Violin Concertos. She now records exclusively for PentaTone Classics. Arabella Steinbacher plays the Booth Stradivarius (1716) provided by the Nippon Music Foundation and uses a bow from luthier Benoit Rolland.
Julia Fischer is a German violinist, pianist, and teacher born on June 15, 1983 (Perlman was 38 years old). She was a child prodigy. Fischer began her violin studies at age 4. At age 9, she entered the Munich Academy of Music where she studied with Ana Chumachenco. At age 12 (1995), she won the International Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition. She began concertizing soon after. She made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2003. It has been publicized that to honor the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, Fischer played on Mozart’s own violin (a Pietro Antonio Dalla Costa) in Salzburg. Her discography is fairly extensive already and her reviews are always full of superlatives. Her recordings of Prokofiev, Glazunov, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Bach have won accolades from reviewers. She plays with a ferocious technique but an unpretentious, alluring sound. YouTube has many videos of her performances. A little over a year ago, Fischer played Grieg’s piano concerto in Frankfurt, Germany. On that occasion, she also played the B minor violin concerto by Camille Saint Saens. Fischer uses a Guadagnini from 1742. She is also currently teaching at the University of Frankfurt. Unfortunately, she has a reputation for being very rude and arrogant with colleagues.
Leopold Auer was a Hungarian violinist, teacher, conductor, and composer born on June 7, 1845 (Brahms was 12 years old.) He was born in a small town and first studied with Kohne in Budapest then with Dont in Vienna but stopped in 1858 when the scholarship money from his wealthy patrons ran out. At that point, being only 13 years of age, he was actually forced to start playing for a living. Auer went on to study with Joseph Joachim for two very critical years in Hanover (1861-1863.) From there, he went to work as an orchestral musician in Dusseldorf and Hamburg. In 1868, a trip to London proved fruitful. There, he met pianist Anton Rubinstein, who invited him to teach at the recently founded (1862) St Petersburg Conservatory. The rest is history, since Auer stayed on for 49 years. Nevertheless, Auer continued to play in the various orchestras of the Imperial Theatres and to perform extensively as soloist in other venues. He was also first violin of the string quartet of the Russian Musical Society for 38 years. He came to the U. S. in 1918, debuting in Carnegie Hall in March of that year – aged 73. He started teaching at the Juilliard School of Music in 1926 and at the Curtis Institute in 1928. Before then, he had taught privately from his home studio. Auer is remembered for refusing to play the Tchaikovsky violin concerto despite its having been dedicated to him and for having produced some of the finest violinists of the early Twentieth Century – Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, Mischa Elman, Boris Chumachenko, Iso Briselli, Mishel Piastro, Kathleen Parlow, Toscha Seidel, Emil Mlynarski, and Efrem Zimbalist among them. He was also somewhat unusual in that, unlike most violinists, he did not idolize J.S. Bach, though he played some of Bach’s music for violin. In addition to three books on violin technique, he wrote some pieces which are now seldom played (if at all) and an arrangement of Paganini’s Twenty Fourth Caprice which Heifetz used to play. Auer died on July 15, 1930, at age 85 (Heifetz was 28 years old.)
