Yuval Waldman Conducting

Violinist and conductor Yuval Waldman has been described as “brilliant” (Musical America) and “spectacular” (The New York Times). Born in Russia, Waldman played his first public performance at the age of 8. He was educated in Israel, Europe and the United States, after which he made his New York debut on the International Series at Carnegie Hall, Jeunesse Musicales.

Maestro Waldman is a versatile performer. He has earned acclaim both for his playing of the standard repertory and for his thoughtful and stylish interpretations of Baroque music. He has also championed rarely performed nineteenth century masterpieces and commissioned or premiered works by contemporary American and Israeli composers.

Yuval Waldman Violinist

Yuval Waldman and Kinor Quartet

Yuval Waldman, Conductor


Israel Chamber Orchestra
Tel Aviv, 1967- Yuval Waldman with
Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman, Alexander Schneider, and Miriam Fried

 

Waldman has appeared as a violin soloist with dozens of prominent orchestras in the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel and given recitals at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, Wigmore Hall in London and Concergebouw in Amsterdam. He has performed with such artists as Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Maureen Forrestser and Henrik Szerngyg. He is the first violinist in the acclaimed Kinor String Quartet and a winner of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation Prize and the Distinguished First Prize at the Conservatory of Geneva. He has recorded on the Angel, Newport Classics, Omega Classica, CRI, Musique International and Musical Heritage Society labels.

Maestro Waldman’s career as a conductor includes performances and recordings with several of the orchestras listed above, as well as the New American Chamber Orchestra, the Midatlantic Chamber Orchestra; the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra and the Cologne Opera. He celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Israel in Moscow and conducted the memorial concert on the steps of Congress on September 11, 2002. He was the founding music director of the Madeira Bach Festival, the Jefferson Music Festival in Washington D.C., the Opus Berkshire Festival in Massachusetts and the Benedictine Millenium Festival in Rome. He has served as director of the World Bank Mozart Festival and the Midatlantic Chamber Orchestra.

As a teacher, Maestro Waldman served as Chairman of the Strings Department at the State University of New York at Purchase, and is on the faculty of Summertrios and the Waterville Valley Music Center. He gives master classes all over the world, most recently at Eastern European University in Izhevsk, Russia; Armaty, Kazakhstan; and at the University for Science and the Arts (USAO) in Chicasha, Oklahoma.

In 2005, Maestro Waldman founded Music Bridges International, Inc., to foster cross-cultural music exchange programs that feature the music of different countries. Under the Music Bridges banner, he organized the successful Young Artists Strings Competition at the “Tchaikovsky’s Homeland” Center in Izhevsk/Votkinsk, Russia. Bridge is presently working on exchanges with Kazakhstan, Switzerlerland and the Czech Republic.

During 2007, Maestro Waldman will, among other things, concertize twice at Carnegie Hall (where he will premiere works by jazz great Dick Hyman and Swiss-American composer Johannes Somary), make his third recording with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, appear at the Tchaikovsky Festival in Russia and be artist-in-residence at USAO. This year will also see the release of “Beethoven: Known and Unknown ,” a recording made in 2006 with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic that features (under his baton) world premiere recordings of two “lost” works by Beethoven (the Overture from the unfinishec opera Macbeth and a movement of the Oboe Concerto), as well as an exciting interpretation of the Fifth Symphony and Waldman’s rendition (as soloist) of the Romance for Violin and Orchestra.

Yuval Waldman and Anne Baxtor
Madeira Bach Festival, 1980

Yuval Waldman, Jean-Pierre Rampal,
and Tony Newman
Madeira Bach Festival, 1980