Vivi Vassileva

Marimba and timpani are the core of it, but Vivi Vassileva's instrument is really a collection: drums from Africa, South America and Asia, and objects salvaged from the scrapheap. Born in Hof in 1994, she was the youngest member of the Bundesjugendorchester at thirteen, studied Latin American and classical percussion with Claudio Estay, and worked with Peter Sadlo from the age of sixteen until his death in 2016, completing her master's degree with Raymond Curfs. She was solo percussionist of the Mannheimer Philharmoniker in 2011. Special prizes at the ARD International Music Competition followed in 2014, the Bavarian Kunstförderpreis in 2017 and the Leonard Bernstein Award of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in 2023. She founded her own quintet in 2015 and has played in duo with the guitarist Lucas Campara Diniz since 2017. New music comes to her as a matter of course: in May 2019 she gave the first performance of Oriol Cruixent's percussion concerto Oraculum with the Wuppertal symphony orchestra. Three Bulgarian cities — Sofia, Ruse and Plovdiv — heard her as soloist with the Sofia Philharmonic in the course of 2026. She is the sister of the violinist Vasko Vassilev, came to percussion from the violin and piano, took a first prize at Jugend musiziert at thirteen and completed her training in Martin Grubinger's class at the Mozarteum in Salzburg; she was the second percussionist, after Grubinger himself, to receive the Schleswig-Holstein award. An Alpha Classics artist since 2019, she began with the album Singin' Rhythm and has since recorded Daníel Bjarnason's Inferno with the Iceland Philharmonic and Gregor Mayrhofer's Recycling Concerto with the SWR Symphony Orchestra, and she gave the first performance of Sauli Zinovjev's A Savage Beat with the Beethoven Orchester Bonn.