Viktoria Mullova

Helsinki first, then Moscow: Viktoria Mullova took first prize at the Sibelius Competition in 1980 and the gold medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1982, having come up through Moscow's Central Music School and the Conservatory, where she studied with Leonid Kogan. She left the Soviet Union in 1983. Born in 1959 in Zhukovsky, outside Moscow, she recorded the two concertos that had made her name — the Tchaikovsky and the Sibelius — with the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa in 1985, and her Brahms concerto took an Echo Klassik a decade later. What followed was less predictable. Mullova moved to gut strings and historical bows, played Vivaldi and Bach with period ensembles including the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and set down the solo sonatas and partitas twice, the second time in 2009; Bach has remained the centre of her playing, and the discs on Onyx that surround him range well outside the classical repertoire altogether. She plays the 1723 "Jules Falk" Stradivari and a Guadagnini of 1750. She appeared with the Sofia Philharmonic in December 2019. Her period-instrument work has also taken in Il Giardino Armonico, Venice Baroque and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, and the Vivaldi concertos she recorded with Giovanni Antonini took the Diapason d'Or de l'Année in 2005. Away from the classical repertoire she made Through the Looking Glass in 2000 with arrangements by Matthew Barley, followed by The Peasant Girl and Stradivarius in Rio, and she commissioned new pieces from Fraser Trainer, Thomas Larcher and Dai Fujikura. In September 2018 Onyx released her account of Pärt's complete works for violin and orchestra with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and Paavo Järvi.