Yuri BASHMET

Yuri Bashmet was born in 1953. He began studying at the Moscow Conservatoire at the age of eighteen, first with Vadim Borisovsky, violist of the Beethoven Quartet, and later with Feodor Druzhinin. He subsequently became the youngest person ever to be appointed to a professorship at the Moscow Conservatoire. In 1976, Bashmet won first prize at the International Viola Competition in Munich, which launched his international career.
Yuri Bashmet has inspired many composers to write for him. He enjoyed an especially close and productive relationship with Alfred Schnittke, and premiered the composer's Viola Concerto at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in 1986. Other works written for Bashmet include Giya Kancheli's Viola Concerto, which the violist premiered at the Berlin Festival, The Myrrh Bearer by John Tavener, a concerto by Poul Ruders and Sofia Gubaidulina's Viola Concerto, which he premiered with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Kent Nagano in April 1997. Bashmet also gave the world premiere of Benjamin Britten's recently edited Double Concerto for violin and viola with Gidon Kremer and the Halle Orchestra conducted by Kent Nagano in Manchester in February 1998.
In 1992 Bashmet began working with a new group, Moscow Soloists, which he directs himself.
In a number of major concert halls, including La Scala in Milan and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Bashmet has been the first violist ever to give a solo recital. He has appeared with nearly all the world's leading orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Montreal Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic and London's Philharmonia Orchestra.