Back to Biographies
Gil Shaham
At twenty-six, violinist Gil Shaham is already hailed as a veteran virtuoso
of his instrument. Since his 1981 debut with the Jerusalem Symphony led by the
late Alexander Schneider, he has been consistently acclaimed for his
performances with the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland
Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the
San Francisco, Montreal, and Detroit symphonies, as well as with major
orchestras overseas, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Israel
Philharmonic, and the London Symphony, with which he made two dramatic l989
appearances substituting, on a day's notice, for an ailing ltzhak Perlman. Mr.
Shaham made his Boston Pops debut in 1996. Recitals and orchestral engagements
have taken him to music capitals worldwide. Summer festival appearances have
included the Hollywood Bowl, Tanglewood, Ravinia, Aspen, Schleswig-Holstein,
and Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival. An exclusive Deutsche Grammophon
recording artist, Mr. Shaham has recorded concertos by Mendelssohn, Bruch,
Paganini, Saint-Saens, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and Wieniawski, as well as solo
discs of music by Schumann, Richard Strauss, Elgar, Ravel, Franck, Kreisler,
Paganini, Saint-Saens, and Sarasate. Recent best-selling releases include
Vivaldi's Four Seasons with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, a
collaboration with guitarist Goran Sollcher entitled Paganini for Two,
and a Grammy-nominated disc of the Barber and Korngold violin concertos with
Andre Previn and the London Symphony. His latest releases include another
collaboration with Orpheus, Romances for Violin and Orchestra, as well
as the two Prokofiev concertos with Previn and the London Symphony.
Born in
1971 in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, Gil Shaham moved with his parents in 1973 to Israel, where at age seven he began violin studies with
Samuel Bernstein of the Rubin Academy of Music and was immediately granted
annual scholarships by the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. In 1981, while
studying with Haim Taub, in Jerusalem, he made debuts with the Jerusalem
Symphony and Israel Philharmonic. That same year he began his studies with
Dorothy Delay and Jens Filerman at Aspen. In 1982, after taking first prize in
Israel's Claremont Competition, he became a scholarship student at Juilliard,
where he has worked with Ms. DeLay and Hyo Kang. Recipient of the Avery Fisher
Grant in 1990, Mr. Shaham is a graduate of the Horace Mann School in New York
City and has also attended Columbia University. He plays a 1699 Stradivarius
named after Countess Polignac.