Events3 results
About
Leonidas Kavakos (Greek: Λεωνίδας Καβάκος; born 30 October 1967) is a Greek violinist and conductor. He has won several international violin competition prizes, including the Sibelius, Paganini, Naumburg, and Indianapolis competitions. He is an Onassis Foundation scholar. He has also recorded for record labels such as Sony/BMG and BIS. As a conductor, he was an artistic director of the Camerata Salzburg and has been a guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Leonidas Kavakos is recognized worldwide as a performer of exceptional skill, rare virtuosity, captivating audiences and experts alike with his superb musicality and integrity of interpretation. The violinist was born in 1967 in Athens to a family of musicians and took his first steps in music under the guidance of his parents. He then studied at the Greek Conservatory with Stelios Kafantaris, whom he considers one of his three main mentors, along with Joseph Gingold and Ferenc Rados. By the age of 21, Kavakos had already won three prestigious international competitions: in 1985, he won the Sibelius Competition in Helsinki, and in 1988, the Paganini Competition in Genoa and the Naumburg Competition in the USA. These achievements brought the young violinist worldwide fame, as did the recording that soon followed – the first in history – of the original version of the Concerto by J. Sibelius, which was awarded the Gramophone magazine prize. The musician was honored to play the famous violin Il Cannone by Guarneri del Gesù, which belonged to Paganini. During his years as a soloist, Kavakos had the opportunity to perform with the most famous orchestras and conductors in the world, such as the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Mariss Jansons, the London Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and Riccardo Chailly. In the 2012/13 season, he was an artist-in-residence with the Berlin Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra, and participated in the anniversary tour of the Concertgebouw Orchestra and M. Jansons with Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 2 (the orchestra performed this work for the first time). In the 2013/14 season, Kavakos made his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of R. Chailly. In the USA, he regularly performs with the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras, the Chicago and Boston Symphony Orchestras, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. In the 2014/15 season, the violinist was an artist-in-residence with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The collaboration began with a new tour of European cities under the direction of maestro Mariss Jansons. Also last season, Kavakos was an artist-in-residence with the National Symphony Orchestra of the USA in Washington. In January 2015, Kavakos performed the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle, and in February he premiered it at the Barbican in London. A man of the world, Kavakos maintains and nurtures close ties with his homeland, Greece. For 15 years, he has been patron of a series of chamber music concerts at the Megaron Concert Hall in Athens, featuring musicians who are his friends and regular collaborators: Mstislav Rostropovich, Heinrich Schiff, Emanuel Ax, Nikolai Lugansky, Yuja Wang, Gautier Capuçon. He curates annual violin and chamber music master classes in Athens, attracting violinists and ensembles from all over the world and demonstrating a deep commitment to the dissemination of musical knowledge and traditions. Kavakos’ conducting career has been developing rapidly in the last decade. Since 2007, he has been conductor of the Salzburg Chamber Orchestra (Camerata Salzburg), succeeding Sir Roger Norrington. In Europe, he has conducted the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the Finnish Radio Orchestra and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra; in the USA, the Boston, Atlanta and St. Louis Symphony Orchestras. Last season, the musician again performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Orchestra, and made his debut at the conductor's podium with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra. Since 2012, Leonidas Kavakos has been an exclusive Decca Classics artist. His debut release on this label, the complete Beethoven violin sonatas with Enrico Pace, won the ECHO Klassik Awards Instrumentalist of the Year award in 2013 and was nominated for a Grammy. In the 2013/14 season, Kavakos and Pace presented the complete Beethoven sonatas cycle at Carnegie Hall in New York and in the Far East. The violinist’s second disc on Decca Classics, released in October 2013, features the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Gewandhaus Orchestra (conducted by Riccardo Chailly). The third disc on the same label (Brahms violin and piano sonatas with Yuja Wang) was released in the spring of 2014. In November 2014, the musicians performed a cycle of sonatas at Carnegie Hall (the concert was broadcast in the USA and Canada), and in 2015 they are presenting the program in major cities in Europe. Following the Sibelius Concerto and a number of other early recordings on the Dynamic, BIS and ECM labels, Kavakos has recorded extensively on Sony Classical, including Mozart's five violin concertos and Symphony No. 39 with the Camerata Salzburg orchestra and the Mendelssohn Concerto (this recording was awarded the ECHO Klassik Prize in 2009).In 2014, the violinist was awarded the Gramophone Prize and named "Artist of the Year". In the summer of 2015, he took part in major international festivals: "Stars of the White Nights" in St. Petersburg, Verbier, Edinburgh, Annecy. Among his partners in these concerts were the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra with Valery Gergiev and the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic with Yuri Temikanov, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra with Gianandrea Noseda. In June 2015, Leonidas Kavakos was a member of the jury of the violin competition of the XV International Tchaikovsky Competition. The 2015/2016 season is full of bright events in the musician's career. Among them: tours in Russia (concerts in Kazan with the Tatarstan State Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Sladkovsky and in Moscow with the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia conducted by Vladimir Jurowski); concerts in the UK and a tour of Spain with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (conductor V. Jurowski); two long tours of US cities (Cleveland, San Francisco, Philadelphia in November 2015; New York, Dallas in March 2016); concerts with the orchestras of the Bavarian Radio (conductor Mariss Jansons), the London Symphony Orchestra (Simon Rattle), the Vienna Symphony Orchestra (Vladimir Jurowski), the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre National de Lyon (Jukka-Pekka Saraste), the Orchestre de Paris (Paavo Jarvi), the Orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala (Daniel Harding), the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra (Gustavo Gimeno), the Staatskapelle Dresden (Robin Ticciati) and a number of other leading ensembles from Europe and the USA; performances as a conductor and soloist with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the Netherlands Radio Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra; chamber concerts in which the musician's partners will be pianists Enrico Pace and Nikolai Lugansky, cellist Gautier Capuçon. Leonidas Kavakos is passionate about studying the art of making violins and bows (antique and modern), considering this art a great mystery and secret, unsolved to this day. He himself plays the Abergavenny Stradivarius violin (1724), is the owner of violins made by the best modern masters, as well as an exclusive collection of bows.