Boris Belkin

Born in Sverdlovsk in 1948, Boris Belkin first played in public as a child, with Kirill Kondrashin conducting. He studied with Yuri Yankelevich at the Central Music School of the Moscow Conservatory and with Felix Andrievsky, and won first prize at the Soviet National Competition for Violinists in 1973; he left the Soviet Union the following year. He performed with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw, Boston, Cleveland, the Israel Philharmonic, with Bernstein, Haitink, Mehta, Muti and Ozawa on the podium, and his concerto discography runs from Paganini and Brahms to Sibelius, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. He began teaching at the Maastricht conservatoire in 1997 and gave masterclasses at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana from 1986 to 2020; Janine Jansen was among his students. He was seven at that first concert, and Glezarova taught him in Moscow alongside Yankelevich and Andrievsky. His first record was Paganini's First Concerto with the Israel Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta, and television caught him in the Tchaikovsky with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic and in Ravel's Tzigane with Bernstein and the Orchestre National de France. Isaac Stern invited him to the Miyazaki Festival in 1997; he also played at the Rostropovich Festival in Moscow with Temirkanov and the St Petersburg Philharmonic.