Ilya Gringolts wins over audiences with his highly virtuosic playing and sophisticated interpretations and is always seeking out new musical challenges. As a sought-after soloist, Ilya Gringolts devotes himself to the great orchestral repertoire as well as to contemporary and rare works; he is also interested in historical performance practices. His concert programmes include virtuosic early repertoire by Paganini, Leclair, and Locatelli. At the beginning of the year, he premiered his own arrangement of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. He also launched new works by Peter Maxwell Davies, Christophe Bertrand, Bernhard Lang, Beat Furrer, and Michael Jarrell and premieres by Augusta Read Thomas, Michael Jarrell, Christophe Bertrand, and Albert Schnelzer. In the summer of 2020, Ilya Gringolts and Ilan Volkov founded the I&I Foundation for the promotion of contemporary music, which awards commissions to young composers. A first series of short solo works was created last season, including works by Yu Kuwabara and Sky Maclachlan, which debuted on BBC Radio Scottish and at the Accademia Chigiana.

Ilya Gringolts began the 2022/23 season with Nicolas Altstaedt and Lawrence Power at the Musikfest Berlin, in celebration of Wolfgang Rihm’s 70th birthday. Further invitations brought him to the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the ORF Radio-Symphonic Orchestra Vienna, the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under Andrey Boreyko, the Helsinki Philharmonic and Radio Filharmonisch Orkest under Hannu Lintu, the Oslo Philharmonic under Klaus Mäkelä and the National Symphony Orchestra Taiwan. He will conduct the Camerata Bern from his violin at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and an extensive tour with the Australian Chamber Orchestra will once again bring him to Australia.

Ilya Gringolts has performed with renowned orchestras such as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Recent highlights have been joint projects with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra, the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, the Wiener Symphoniker, the Bamberger Symphoniker, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Budapest Festival Orchestra and the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire. From his violin, he has recently conducted projects with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra, the Camerata Bern, and Ensemble Resonanz.

For his Diapason d’Or and Gramophone Editor’s Choice Award-winning recording of Locatelli’s Il labirinto armonico (2021), Ilya Gringolts also led the Finnish Baroque Orchestra from the podium. This was followed in the same year by the solo CD Ciaccona with works by Bach, Pauset, Gerhard, and Holliger, which also received the Gramophone Editor’s Choice Award. His extensive discography of highly acclaimed CD productions for Deutsche Grammophon, BIS, and Hyperion, among others, also includes the critically acclaimed recording of Paganini’s 24 Caprices for solo violin and the second part of his recording of the complete violin works of Stravinsky (2018), recorded with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia under Dima Slobodeniouk and awarded the Diapason d’Or.

As first violinist of the Gringolts Quartet, he has enjoyed great success at the Salzburg Festival, Lucerne Festival, Edinburgh Festival, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Konzerthaus Dortmund, and Teatro La Fenice in Venice. A highly esteemed chamber musician, Ilya Gringolts regularly collaborates with artists such as Nicolas Altstaedt, Alexander Lonquich, James Boyd, Itamar Golan, Peter Laul, Aleksandar Madzar, Christian Poltera, David Kadouch, Lawrence Power and Jörg Widmann.

After studying violin and composition with Tatiana Liberova and Zhanneta Metallidi in St. Petersburg, he attended the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied with Itzhak Perlman. He won the International Violin Competition Premio Paganini (1998) and is still the youngest winner in the competition’s history; he was also named a BBC New Generation Artist at the outset of his career. In addition to his professor position at the Zurich University of the Arts, Ilya Gringolts was appointed to the renowned Accademia Chigiana in Siena in 2021. He plays a Stradivari (1718 “ex-Prové”) violin.