Grammy Award-winner Maxim Vengerov is one of today’s finest violinists and most sought-after soloists. He also enjoys an international reputation as a conductor.
Born in 1974, he began his career at the age of five. As a student of Galina Turchaninova and Zakhar Bron, he won the internationally renowned Henryk Wieniawski and Carl Flesch Violin Competitions at the age of ten and 15 respectively. He made his first studio recording when he was ten, followed by a large number of recordings for various leading labels. His recordings have won various of prestigious awards including a Grammy for best instrumental soloist, two Gramophone Awards, a Classical Brit, five Edison Classical Music Awards, two ECHO Klassik Awards and a World Economic Forum Crystal Award. His latest recordings, available exclusively from Idagio – the world’s largest audio streaming service for classical music – include a new recording of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Myung-Whun Chung and a live recording of a February 2020 recital from Carnegie Hall.
Maxim Vengerov has recently appeared as a soloist and conductor with many major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Chicago and Toronto Symphony Orchestras and the Filarmonica della Scala. He was artist in residence with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo and at the Philharmonie in Paris during the 2018/19 season. In 2020 he was named Classic FM’s first solo artist in residence.
One of Maxim Vengerov’s greatest passions is teaching and encouraging young talent and he has held positions at various universities, conservatories and music colleges around the world. He is currently the Stephan and Viktoria Schmidheiny professor at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. Since September 2016 he has also been the Polonsky visiting professor of violin at the Royal College of Music in London. Aiming to make musical support more accessible, he launched his own online teaching platform in January 2021 at
www.maximvengerov.com.
He has been the subject of various documentaries, including Playing by Heart for Channel Four, which was screened at the 1999 Cannes Television Festival, and Living the Dream, which received the Gramophone Award for best documentary in 2008.
Maxim Vengerov has received a number of prestigious fellowships and honours, including from the Royal Academy of Music, the orders of merit from Romania and Saarland and, in 2012, an honorary fellowship of Trinity College, Oxford. In 1997 he became the first classical musician to be appointed an International Goodwill Ambassador by UNICEF.
He plays the ‘ex-Kreutzer’ Stradivari of 1727.
