Gidon Kremer

Kremer began the violin at four with his father and grandfather in Riga and went to David Oistrakh at the Moscow Conservatory in 1965; a prize at the Queen Elisabeth in 1967 and first prizes at the Paganini in 1969 and the Tchaikovsky in 1970 opened the career. Alongside the classical literature he has made living composers a lifelong commitment and given a great many first performances — Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Pärt, Kancheli, Silvestrov, Glass, and Piazzolla, whose tangos he carried into the concert hall. In 1981 he founded the Lockenhaus chamber music festival and directed it for three decades; in 1997 he formed Kremerata Baltica from young players of the three Baltic states, and has toured and recorded with them ever since. His recordings include the Grammy-winning After Mozart; the Praemium Imperiale came in 2016. He was still on tour with the Kremerata in the 2025–26 season. Born in Riga in 1947, he entered the city's music school at seven and won the first prize of the Republic of Latvia at sixteen, and he was also a laureate in Montreal in 1969. He ran the les muséiques festival in Basel as its first artistic director from 2002 to 2006, and his campaign for the music of Mieczysław Weinberg has produced records for Deutsche Grammophon, Accentus Music and ECM. His honours include the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, Latvia's Grand Music Award, the Beethoven Prize of Bonn in 2023 and the ICMA lifetime award in 2025; he has written four books and a volume of memoirs, and plays an Amati of 1641.