Roman Mints (born 1976 in Moscow) is a British violinist. He has worked with other violinists and together with oboist Dmitry Bulgakov founded the Homecoming Chamber Music Festival. He has given premieres of various works and recorded a number of albums.
Roman Mints was born in Moscow and began playing the violin at the age of five. In 1994, he won a Foundation Scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London and also studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, winning prizes at each, alongside contemporaries Dobrinka Tabakova, Elena Langer, Maxim Rysanov and Kristina Blaumane. [1]
Roman Mints has collaborated with violinists Gidon Kremer, Alina Ibragimova, Boris Brovtsyn, Alexander Sitkovetsky; flautist Sharon Bezaly, oboists Dmitri Bulgakov and Nicholas Daniel; pianists Katya Apekisheva, Ingrid Fliter, Alexander Kobrin, Charles Owen, Vadym Kholodenko, Andrey Gugnin, Lukas Geniušas; cellists Boris Andrianov, Jamie Walton, Alexander Buzlov and Kristina Blaumane; violists Maxim Rysanov and Nils Mönkemeyer; singers Gweneth-Ann Jeffers, William Purefoy and Anna Dennis. He has worked alongside conductors Andrew Davis, Saulius Sondeckis, Vladimir Ziva, Vladimir Ponkin, Philipp Chizhevsky and others. He has performed with groups as London Mozart Players, London Chamber Orchestra, Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, Musica Viva Orchestra, Russian Philharmonia, Kremerata Baltica, Prague Soloists and Prague Sinfonia. [2]
Roman has given Russian premieres of works by Osvaldo Golijov, John Tavener, James MacMillan, Giacinto Scelsi and Marjan Mozetich. He has also given world premieres of over fifty works by Dobrinka Tabakova, Leonid Desyatnikov, Elena Langer, Ed Bennett, Brian Irvine, Diana Burrell, Artem Vassiliev, Alexey Kurbatov and others. [2]
In 1998, Roman Mints and oboist Dmitry Bulgakov founded the Homecoming Chamber Music Festival which takes place annually in Moscow. The core of Homecoming concert programmes are themed selections of works with one powerful underlying but not necessarily musical, idea behind them. Since the inception of the festival, Roman Mints has authored more than 60 such programmes. In April 2002, he co-directed the Suppressed Music project in Russia, which consisted of two concerts and a conference on composers whose music had been suppressed. A book and CD were released as a result of this project, by the Klassika XXI Publishing House. [3]
Outside the classical field, Roman has worked with free-improvising saxophonist Paul Dunmall, vocalist Alisa Ten, the Brian Irvine Ensemble, Pokrovsky Ensemble, and Russian IDM group EU. He has also participated in several theatre productions including Langer's "Ariadne" and Stravinsky’s "The Soldier’s Tale". He has worked with theatre directors Vasily Barkhatov and Tim Hopkins, choreographers Alla Sigalova and Oleg Glushkov, and film director Alexander Zeldovich. His recording of the Mozetich Violin Concerto "Affairs of the Heart" was used in productions by Hong Kong Ballet, Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Q-dance company. [1]
Roman Mints plays a Francesco Ruggieri violin, circa 1685.
Roman Mints has recorded for ECM, Harmonia Mundi, Quartz and other labels, with his albums featuring a number of world-premiere recordings. An album of works by Dobrinka Tabakova for ECM was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Compendium. [4] His recording of solo violin music, with an innovative recording approach invented by Roman and dubbed “spatial orchestration,” was a CD of the week at WQXR Radio New York and on the annual wish list of Fanfare magazine critics. The album of Leonid Desyatnikov's music for violin and orchestra was nominated for ICMA Award and received a Five Stars review for performance and recording with BBC Music Magazine. [5] [2] [3]
Gidon Kremer is a Latvian classical violinist, artistic director, and founder of Kremerata Baltica.
The N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov Saint Petersburg State Conservatory is a school of music in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In 2004, the conservatory had around 275 faculty members and 1,400 students.
Kremerata Baltica is a chamber orchestra consisting of musicians from Baltic countries. It was founded by Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer in 1997. Gidon Kremer is an artistic director of Kremerata Baltica.
Leonid Borisovich Kogan was a preeminent Soviet violinist during the 20th century. Many consider him to be among the greatest violinists of the 20th century. In particular, he is considered to have been one of the greatest representatives of the Soviet School of violin playing.
Kim Kashkashian is an American violist. She has spent her career in the U.S. and Europe and collaborated with many major contemporary composers. In 2013 she won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. She is recognized as one of the world's top violists.
Levon Ambartsumian is an Armenian classical violinist and conductor. Levon Ambartsumian currently lives and works in Athens, Georgia, United States.
Leonid Arkadievich Desyatnikov is a Russian composer who first made a reputation with a number of film scores, then achieving greater fame when his controversial opera The Children of Rosenthal was premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
Marjan Mozetich is a Canadian composer who has written music for theatre, film and dance, as well as many symphonic works, chamber music, and solo pieces. He has written compulsory competition pieces for the 1992 Banff String Quartet Competition and the 1995 Montreal International Music Competition. Co-founder of Arraymusic in Toronto, Mozetich served as their artistic director from 1976 to 1978. After his work with Array, he worked for some time at the University of Toronto music library, and then became a freelance composer. Mozetich moved to Howe Island, near Kingston, Ontario, and taught composition at Queen's University in Kingston from 1991 to 2010. He has won several awards, including the first prize in the CAPAC (SOCAN)-Sir Ernest MacMillan Award. His major compositions include Fantasia... sul linguaggio perduto, and Postcards from the Sky.
The Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano in A minor, D. 821, was written by Franz Schubert in Vienna in November 1824. The sonata is the only substantial composition extant today for the arpeggione. The sonata was composed in November 1824, about a month after Schubert had returned to Vienna from his second stay in Zseliz. It has been adapted to other string instruments, especially the cello.
Tabula Rasa is a musical composition written in 1977 by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. The piece contains two movements, "Ludus" and "Silentium," and is a double concerto for two solo violins, prepared piano, and chamber orchestra.
Ioana Petcu-Colan is an Irish violinist of Romanian origin, currently living in Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland.
Alexander Mikhailovich Raskatov is a Russian composer.
Alexander Ivashkin, was a Russian cellist, writer, academic and conductor.
Dobrinka Tabakova is a Bulgarian-British composer.
Jack Liebeck is a British–German violinist. In 2010, he won a Classical Brit in the young British classical performer category. He was soloist on the score for the 2011 film Jane Eyre, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and also on the Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominated soundtrack for Anna Karenina (2012). Both scores were composed by Dario Marianelli. He records exclusively for Hyperion Records.
The GAIA Music Festival was founded by violinist Gwendolyn Masin. The festival is hosted annually, usually in the month of May, in Oberhofen and Hilterfingen, as well as the cities of Thun and Berne. The Festival is non-profit. From 2010 until 2014, the Patron of the Festival was David Zinman.
New Era Orchestra is an orchestra from Kyiv, Ukraine, founded in 2007 by its conductor and artistic director Tetiana Kalinichenko. The orchestra plays both contemporary and classical music. Among others, the orchestra has performed with renowned soloists such as Joshua Bell, Sarah Chang, Avi Avital and Danjulo Ishizaka.
The Concerto Grosso No. 1 was the first of six concerti grossi by Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke. It was written in 1976–1977 at the request of Gidon Kremer and Tatiana Grindenko who were also the violin soloists at its premiere on 21 March 1977 in Leningrad together with Yuri Smirnov on keyboard instruments and the Leningrad Chamber Orchestra under Eri Klas. It is one of the best-known of Schnittke's polystylistic compositions and marked his break-through in the West.
Elena Langer is a Russian-born British composer of opera and other contemporary classical music. Her work has been performed at the Royal Opera House, Zurich Opera, Carnegie Hall, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, Wigmore Hall, Opera national du Rhin, Strasbourg, and Milton Court, Barbican Centre. She studied piano and composition at the Gnessin State Musical College in Moscow and composition at the Moscow Conservatoire; in 1999 she moved to London and studied composition at the Royal College of Music (1999–2000) with Julian Anderson and the Royal Academy of Music (2001–03) with Simon Bainbridge.
Ivan Yanakov is a Bulgarian-born pianist and conductor. He has performed on four continents, with a repertoire ranging from the Baroque era to contemporary.