Posted on June 23rd, 2010 by admin
Boris Brovtsyn was born in Moscow in 1977 into a family with deep musical roots, and started to play violin under the guidance of his grandfather, a pupil of Lev Zeitlin and Abram Yampolsky. He entered the famous Central Music School in 1984 and graduated with a Bachelor Degree in 1994 before becoming a student of Maya Glezarova at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. He graduated with a diploma in 1999 and is now a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, studying with David Takeno. He made his first public appearance on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre at the age of six and since then has performed in the main concert halls in Moscow, St Petersburg, and other cities of Russia as well as in cities of New Independent States of the former Soviet Union.
From an early age he has collaborated with such distinguished conductors as Alexander Lazarev and Yuri Bashmet, performing with the Moscow Soloists Chamber Orchestra, Moscow State Chamber Orchestra, Pretoria Symphony, Orchestra National de Lille, BBC Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, and Birmingham Royal Ballet Sinfonia, to name just a few. His concert tours include performances in Germany (alte Opera Hall, Frankfurt; Kölner Philharmonie, Cologne), France (UNESCO Congress Hall and Opera Comique Theatre, Paris); Holland (Concertgebouw Hall, Amsterdam); Austria (Palais Lobkovitz, Vienna).
Boris has made many recordings for television and radio in Russia, Germany, Austria, France, South Africa, the United States, where he first appeared in 1995, and, most notably, in Italy, where he performed in front of His Holiness John-Paul II in September 1993.
His competition awards include second prizes at the Georg Kulenkampf Violin Competition in Cologne, the Transnet International String Competition in Pretoria (South Africa), the International Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition in France as well as first prize at the Tibor Varga Violin Competition in Switzerland. Since 1992 Boris has been a scholar of the Russian Culture foundation (‘New Names’ charity programme).
He will be playing:
Eugène Ysaÿe – Sonata No. 5 in D minor, Op.27 No 5; Sonata No. 6 in E major, Op. 27, No 6 (both 1923)
Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931) was a Belgian violinist, composer and conductor. He was regarded as “The King of the Violin”
Eugène Ysaÿe wrote Six sonatas, a set of sonatas for unaccompanied violin, in July 1923. Each sonata was dedicated to one of Ysaÿe’s contemporary violinists: Joseph Szigeti (No. 1), Jacques Thibaud (No. 2), George Enescu (No. 3), Fritz Kreisler (No. 4), Mathieu Crickboom (No. 5), and Manuel Quiroga (No. 6). After having heard Joseph Szigeti perform Johann Sebastian Bach’s sonata for solo violin in G minor, Ysaÿe was inspired to compose violin works that represent the evolution of musical techniques and expressions of his time. As Ysaÿe claimed: ‘I have played everything from Bach to Debussy, for real art should be international.’ In this set of sonatas, he used prominent characteristics of early twentieth century music, such as whole tone scales, dissonances, and quarter tones. Ysaÿe also employed virtuoso bow and left hand techniques throughout, for he believed that ‘at the present day the tools of violin mastery, of expression, technique, mechanism, are far more than necessary than in days gone by. In fact they are indispensable, if the spirit is to express itself without restraint.’ Thus, this set of sonatas places high technical demands on its performers. Yet Ysaÿe repeatedly warns violinists that they should never forget to sing instead of becoming preoccupied with technical elements; a violin master ‘must be a violinist, a thinker, a poet, a human being, he must have known hope, love, passion and despair, he must have run the gamut of the emotions in order to express them all in his playing’.
see http://www.stalbanschamberchoir.org.uk for concert details
| Category Concerts
English music is particularly strongly represented this season. We open with two beautiful works by Herbert Howells in a programme on the theme of Remembrance (November 20th 2010). The young English composer Will Todd’s jazz-inspired Mass in Blue (January 15th 2011) is a complete contrast and has already become a firm favourite with audiences and performers alike. The Choir returns to more familiar ground with a programme of a cappella early English music in the beautiful chapel at All Saints (March 12th 2011), before joining with the Wormser Kantorei for Ralph Vaughan Williams’s choral symphonic masterpiece, A Sea Symphony (April 30th 2011). The season ends with the watery theme continuing in Water, water everywhere (July 2nd 2011), which features the very popular American composer Eric Whitacre among British contributors. 
