Vadim Repin - The Art of Vadim Repin (2020)

Child prodigy, competition winner, major recording artist, and international star of the concert stage, Vadim Repin is clearly one of the leading violinists of his generation. He carries all the credentials of superstardom: he has played with world-class orchestras and major conductors like Levine, Rattle, Muti, Rostropovich, Chailly, and Dutoit and collaborated in recital with Kissin, Argerich, Pletnev, Berezovsky, Bashmet, and many others. Moreover, he has recorded for major labels like DG, Erato, Philips, Warner Classics, and EuroArts, turning out consistently acclaimed performances in a variety of repertory from Mozart, Beethoven, Paganini, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky to Sibelius, Ravel, Prokofiev, Bartók, Shostakovich, and contemporaries like John Adams and Sofia Gubaidulina. Repin has achieved all this despite the view he is a straightforward player, a violinist who displays few, if any mannerisms in his style. Not that his technique isn't on display in concert; Repin is known as one of the finest players of bravura music of his time, as his performances and recordings of the Paganini Caprices and concertos by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Bartók will attest.

Vadim Repin was born in Novosibirsk, Russia, on August 31, 1971. He began playing the violin at the age of five, and six months later gave his first public performance. He became a student of Zakhar Bron in Novosibirsk at seven. That same year Repin appeared with an orchestra, and two years later captured first prize at the Poznan-based Wieniawski Competition.

Repin vaulted to international prominence when he won the 1989 Queen Elizabeth Competition at the age of 17, making him the youngest winner of the event in history. By this time he had already given his major debuts in Japan and the U.K. (both 1987), and soon he relocated to the U.K.

Throughout the 1990s Repin toured Europe, Asia, and the Americas, appearing with major orchestras and giving high-profile recitals. Repin made nine recordings for Melodiya in the 1980s (his first when he was 14!), but his earliest recording to gain international attention was a 1990 disc of sonatas by J.S. Bach and Brahms, available now on MCA.

Franck, Grieg, Janácek: Violin SonatasFollowing tours of Japan and Amsterdam in 1994-1995, Repin recorded the Prokofiev sonatas with pianist Berezovsky in 1995 for Erato. Over the next decade Erato would issue more than a half-dozen additional recordings by Repin. In 2005 Repin signed with Deutsche Grammophon, the label for whom he has since made most of his recordings. His recordings have won a number of awards, including a 2011 BBC Music award for his recording of Grieg, Janácek, and Franck sonatas with Nikolai Lugansky. ~ Robert Cummings