Prof. Kolja Blacher

Prof. Kolja Blacher was born in Berlin. At the age of 15 he went to the Juilliard School of Music in New York to study with Dorothy DeLay. After completing his studies with Sándor Végh in Salzburg he began his career as a soloist. As such he performed with distinguished orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, whose first concertmaster he was from 1993-1999, the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Alongside his solo and chamber music activities he plays every summer as concertmaster of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra under the baton of Claudio Abbado. He appears in concerts with leading conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Alain Gilbert, Dmitri Kitayenko and Kent Nagano. Chamber music partnerships bring Kolja Blacher together with the cellist Clemens Hagen, the viola player Wolfram Christ as well as the pianists Bruno Canino, Kyrill Gerstein and Vassili Lobanov, with whom he gives trio concerts or recitals. He discovered his passion for combining the roles of soloist and conductor through his collaborations with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and he intends to develop this in the future. Apart from numerous radio broadcasts, Kolja Blacher can be heard in several CD recordings. These received amongst other prizes the Diapason d’Or and the German Record Critics’ quarterly prize. Spring 2009 saw the release by Universal of a recording of the Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith violin concertos, with Claudio Abbado and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Kolja Blacher plays the "Tritton" Stradivari violin from the year 1730, which was loaned to him by Ms Kimiko Powers. He held a professorship at the Hamburg Academy of Music from 1999-2009. In the summer semester 2009 he became professor of violin at the Academy of Music Hanns Eisler Berlin.