Vadim Repin

Born in Siberia in 1971, Vadim Repin started to play the violin at the age of five and six months later made his first stage appearance. At the age of eleven he won the gold medal in all age categories at the Wieniawski Competition and gave his recital debuts in Moscow and St Petersburg. In 1985 at the age of fourteen he made his debuts in Tokyo, Munich, Berlin and Helsinki, followed by his Carnegie Hall debut one year later. Two years after that Vadim Repin was the youngest ever winner of the most prestigious and demanding violin competition in the world – the Queen Elisabeth Competition.

Since then he has performed with all of the world’s greatest orchestras and conductors. Repin regularly collaborates with Nikolai Lugansky and Itamar Golan in recital; other chamber music partners include Martha Argerich, Evgeny Kissin and Mischa Maisky. Last season featured concerts with Muti in New York, Thielemann in Tokyo, Chailly in Leipzig, an Australian tour with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski and the unanimously acclaimed premiere of a violin concerto written for him by James MacMillan and performed with the London Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev. The 2010-11 season features concerts throughout Switzerland, performances in Rome with Temirkanov, in Chicago with Muti, in Philadelphia and at New York’s Carnegie Hall with Dutoit for the American premiere of the MacMillan concerto, three different programmes at the Esterházy Palace in Austria and a series of concerts with the Israel Philharmonic under Kurt Masur.

Vadim Repin’s many CDs include prize-winning recordings of the great Russian violin concerti for Warner Classics. His first recording for Deutsche Grammophon featured the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Wiener Philharmoniker and Riccardo Muti, coupled with Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata with Martha Argerich; the second was the Brahms Violin Concerto and the Brahms Double Concerto (Truls Mørk, cello) with the Gewandhaus Orchester Leipzig and Riccardo Chailly. This was followed by the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff Trios with Mischa Maisky and Lang Lang, which won an Echo award and, most recently, an acclaimed recital recording with fellow Russian Nikolai Lugansky which carried off the  BBC Music Magazine award. In February 2010 he was awarded the  Victoire d’honneur, France’s most prestigious music award, for his lifetime dedication to music and in December he became a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Vadim Repin plays the 1743 “Bonjour” violin by Guarneri del Gesù.