Leonidas Kavakos
The Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos won important competitions at an early age: he won first prizes at the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition in Helsinki in 1985, which is held only every five years, at the prestigious Premio Paganini in Genoa in 1988 and at the Naumburg International Violin Competition in New York in the same year. In 1991 he received the Gramophone Concert Award for the first recording of the original version of Sibelius' violin concerto - in 2014 he was named »Gramophone Artist of the Year«.
Since then, Leonidas Kavakos has made guest appearances with the world's leading orchestras, including the Berlin, Vienna and Munich Philharmonic Orchestras, the Orchestre de Paris, the Filarmonica della Scala, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and the orchestras of Boston, New York and Philadelphia. In the summer of 2019 he was »artiste étoile« of the Lucerne Festival and performed together with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Valery Gergiev, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Yuja Wang and others.
As the exclusive artist for Sony Classical, Leonidas Kavakos most recently performed Beethoven's Violin concerto recorded with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in the double role as soloist and conductor.
Leonidas Kavakos can also increasingly be experienced as a conductor. In recent years he has conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony, Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Vienna Symphony, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Filarmonica Teatro La Fenice and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.
As a performer of chamber music, he is a regular guest at the festivals in Verbier, Montreux-Vevey, Tanglewood, Edinburgh and Salzburg. In the Beethoven Year 2020, he will perform the complete Beethoven Sonata cycle in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Milan and Rome, and will give numerous Beethoven recitals at London's Wigmore Hall, Barcelona, Parma and Copenhagen, among other venues. His regular chamber music partners include Enrico Pace, Yuja Wang, Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax.
Leonidas Kavakos plays the »Willemotte«-Stradivari from 1734.