Svetlin Roussev

Svetlin Roussev has been coming back to the March Music Days in Rousse since he was eleven — "an indispensable annual meeting", as he describes it — and the festival has followed the whole of his career since. He studied at the National School of Music in Sofia and entered the Paris Conservatoire at fifteen, took prizes at the Long-Thibaud, Indianapolis, Melbourne and Tibor Varga competitions, and won the first Sendai International Music Competition in 2001. Concertmaster posts followed, at the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and the Seoul Philharmonic, and he has played concertos with the Orchestre National de France, the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, the BBC Symphony and the Rotterdam Philharmonic under conductors including Myung-Whun Chung, Marek Janowski and Emmanuel Krivine. He has taught at the Geneva University of Music since 2008. Born in Rousse in 1976, he began the violin at five with his mother and worked in Paris with Gérard Poulet, Devy Erlih and Jean-Jacques Kantorow, the Conservatoire giving him first prizes for violin and for chamber music in 1994. He recorded Vladigerov and later Ysaÿe, Franck and Saint-Saëns with Elena Rozanova, Hartmann's Concerto funebre with the Orchestre d'Auvergne under Arie van Beek, and the third sonatas of Grieg and Medtner with Frédéric d'Oria-Nicolas, and he plays in the Roussev-Salque-Rozanova trio. Bulgaria named him Musician of the Year for 2006 and gave him the Crystal Lyre the same year; his violin is the 1710 Stradivari Camposelice, lent by the Nippon Music Foundation.