Biography
Fiery passion with impeccable technique, poetry and sensitivity are Repin's trademarks.
Born in Siberia in 1971, he started to play violin at the age of five and six months later had his first stage performance. At eleven he won the gold medal in all age categories in the Wieniawski Competition and gave his recital debuts in Moscow and St Petersburg. In 1985 at fourteen he made his debuts in Tokyo, Munich, Berlin, Helsinki; a year later in Carnegie Hall.
At 17 Vadim Repin was the youngest ever winner of the most prestigious and demanding violin competition in the world, the Reine Elisabeth Concours.
Since then he has performed with world's greatest orchestras: the Berlin Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, NDR Hamburg, New York Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, the Philharmonia, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw, San Francisco Symphony, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, and La Scala, working with leading conductors such as Ashkenazy, Boulez, Chailly, Chung, Conlon, Dohnanyi, Dutoit, Eschenbach, Fedoseyev, Gatti, Gergiev, Jansons, Jurowski, Neeme and Paavo Järvi, Krivine, Levine, Luisi, Marriner, Masur, Mehta, Muti, Nagano, Ozawa, Rattle, Rozhdestvensky, Temirkanov, Thielemann and Zinman.
He regularly collaborates with Nikolai Lugansky and Itamar Golan in recital; other chamber music partners include Martha Argerich, Evgeny Kissin and Mischa Maisky. Among the highlights of his career in the past few seasons have been tours with the London Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev; collaborations with Christian Thielemann in Tokyo, with Riccardo Muti in New York, with Riccardo Chailly in Leipzig, a tour of Australia with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski, and unanimously acclaimed premières in London, Philadelphia, New York's Carnegie Hall, the Salle Pleyel in Paris and Amsterdam's Concertgebouw of the violin concerto written for him by James MacMillan, culminating in a BBC Prom at the sold out Royal Albert Hall last summer.
Vadim Repin's many CDs include prize-winning recordings of the great Russian violin concerti by Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky on Warner Classics. For Deutsche Grammophon he recorded the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic and Riccardo Muti, coupled with Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata with Martha Argerich; the Brahms Violin Concerto and the Brahms Double Concerto (Truls Mørk, cello) with the Gewandhaus Orchester Leipzig and Riccardo Chailly, the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov trios with Mischa Maisky and Lang Lang (which won the Echo Classic) and works by Grieg, Janacek and César Franck with Nikolai Lugansky, which won the 2011 BBC Music Award and the Edison Award. Last year saw the screening by Arte and Bavarian Television of an hour long documentary film by Claudia Willke Vadim Repin - A Magician of Sound which features the artist returning to Siberia where his career began and follows him to Berlin, Paris and other European destinations.
In 2010 he was awarded the Victoire d'Honneur, France's most prestigious musical award for a lifetime's dedication to music, and also became Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres.
Engagements last season included chamber music in Paris and Lyon with Denis Matsuev, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Gautier Capuçon, Alexander Kniazev and other friends, recitals in Italy, Spain, France and the United States, and a series at Japan's Pacific Music Festival. Highlights of the current season include a European tour with Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under Neeme Jarvi, and concerts in Vienna with Kent Nagano and Lionel Bringuier in both the Musikverein and the Konzerthaus. In March 2014 Vadim Repin as Artistic Director presents the first Trans-Siberian Festival of the Arts in Novosibirsk's magnificent new concert hall.
Vadim Repin currently plays on the 1733 Stradivarius 'Rode' violin.