Shlomo Mintz

At eleven he played a concerto with the Israel Philharmonic; at sixteen he was at Carnegie Hall with the Pittsburgh Symphony under William Steinberg. Mintz was born in Moscow in 1957 and taken to Israel as a child, and his formation came from Ilona Feher, a pupil of Hubay and so a direct line back to the Hungarian school, before Juilliard and Dorothy DeLay; Isaac Stern and Zubin Mehta were the advocates who opened the doors. The Deutsche Grammophon recordings of the 1980s remain the centre of his discography — the Bach solo sonatas and partitas, the Paganini caprices, and the Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, Mendelssohn and Bruch concertos — and brought the Grand Prix du Disque twice, the Diapason d'Or, two Edison awards and a Gramophone award. He plays the viola as well, and conducts: principal guest of the Maastricht Symphony between 1994 and 1998 and of the Zagreb Philharmonic from 2008, and artistic director of the Sion-Valais festival from 2002 to 2012. Competition juries have taken up much of his later working life, including the violin panels of the Tchaikovsky and the Queen Elisabeth. He plays a Stradivari of 1710. He was a founder and, from 1992 to 2010, patron of the Keshet Eilon mastercourse at Kibbutz Eilon, and he helped set up Violins of Hope, which restored and exhibited forty-five instruments whose owners died in the ghettos and camps. He has composed as well: Anthem to an Unknown Nation was first heard at the Vigadó in Budapest in June 2017 and the Sonatina Quatre Hommages in Domodossola and Istanbul that October. Decca has issued his Ysaÿe solo sonatas, and Ben-Gurion University gave him an honorary degree in 2006.