| Biography | Lydia Mordkovitch (born 30 April 1944 in Saratov) is a Russian-born British violinist. A protégée of David Oistrakh, she is considered to be one of the top British violinists of the latter half of the 20th century. Since 1995 she has been a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Biography[edit]Mordkovitch was born in Saratov, southeastern Russia, on 30 April 1944. She moved to Odessa in the Ukraine in 1960 where she studied for two years at the Stolyarsky School of Music until 1962. She then moved to Moscow where she studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory under David Oistrakh, later serving as his assistant in 1968 to 1970. During this period she won the National Young Musicians Competition in Kiev in 1967 and the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition in Paris in 1969.] Between 1970 and 1973 she studied at the Institute of Arts. After a period in Israel from 1974 and 1979, teaching at the Israeli Academy of Music in Jerusalem, she moved permanently to the UK in 1980 after taking a liking to country the previous year during a performance in Manchester with John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra. Her debut in the United States came in 1982 when she performed with Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Mordkovitch was signed to the label Chandos and recorded a debut album in the 1980s which contained sonatas by composers such as Prokofiev, Schumann, and Richard Strauss. She has since made over 20 recordings, also recording the works of J.S. Bach, Maayani, Shostakovich and English composers such as Bax, Alwyn, Bliss, Howells and many more. In 1987 she recorded the concertos of Kabalevsky, in 1988 the concertos of Prokofiev, and in 1989, the concertos of Shostakovich. Gramophone has described her playing as "beautiful and evocative, achieving transfiguration in rapt harmonics over impressionistic tremolandi" and with "tremendous verve and vitality".[3][4] The BBC Music Magazine has said that she has "obvious enthusiasm and produces ringingly authoritative interpretations". Fanfare have said "the sonata is the sort of emotionally open, semiprogrammatic, extravagant, all-out piece where Lydia Mordkovitch is heard to best advantage. There is light and shade in her tone.. " Since 1995 she has been a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London.. |