Tugan Sokhiev conducts Mahler’s First

Not of this world
A portrait of the composer Lili Boulanger

Fate dealt Lili Boulanger a cruel hand. The first woman to win the coveted Prix de Rome, she was only nineteen when she effortlessly outclassed every male entrant in the 1913 competition; but within a mere five years, she was dead. 

Biographies

Tugan Sokhiev

“The only authority that exists for a conductor is the music itself,” says Tugan Sokhiev. The conductor, who comes from North Ossetia, sees himself as a medium through which the music speaks to the orchestra and the audience. As a young man, what fascinated him most about the conducting profession was the fact that a single person can have an influence on so many musicians. This realisation prompted him to embark on a career as a conductor himself. He became one of the last students of the legendary teacher Ilya Mussin at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In 1999, he won the Third International Prokofiev Competition and began a career that has taken him to numerous international opera houses and concert halls.

Amihai Grosz

Amihai Grosz plays one of the rare violas from the famous school of Gasparo da Salò, which differs from the brighter sound ideal of Stradivari and Guarneri: “The sound,” says the long-time first solo violist of the Berliner Philharmoniker, “is more down-to-earth, woody and of course wonderfully rich in overtones. But the tone colour is somewhat darker. It sounds much nicer with lower instruments such as the cello, viola and probably also the double bass.” Grosz, who switched from the violin to the viola at the age of eleven, studied with David Chen at the Jerusalem Academy of Music, with Tabea Zimmermann at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin and with Haim Taub at the Keshet Eilon Music Centre.