Elena Bashkirova

Fifteen when she entered her father Dmitri Bashkirov's class at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Elena Bashkirova — born in Moscow in 1958 — took an early and lasting direction from chamber playing with Gidon Kremer. She works internationally as soloist, chamber musician and song accompanist across the Classical and Romantic literature and well into the twentieth century, and has worked with Pierre Boulez, Sergiu Celibidache and Michael Gielen. The Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, which she founded in 1998 and has led as artistic director, is a chamber-music undertaking; its Berlin companion, Intonations, followed in 2012. Since 2020 she has presided over the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Foundation in Leipzig. The Jerusalem festival has travelled to Berlin, Paris, Salzburg, Vienna, Lisbon, Budapest, Buenos Aires and São Paulo, and to the Lucerne Festival, the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, the Enescu Festival in Bucharest and the Beethovenfest in Bonn, its German companion originally housed at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. She has long-standing partnerships with Semyon Bychkov, Lawrence Foster, Karl-Heinz Steffens and Ivor Bolton, and in the 2016/17 season played in Berlin and with the Hamburg Symphony and the Zagreb Philharmonic, and in a trio with Michael Barenboim and Julian Steckel. Intonations moved to Kühlhaus Berlin in 2023.