Pinchas Zukerman

Pinchas Zukerman, born in Tel Aviv in 1948, is one of the defining string players of his generation: a violinist, violist and conductor of rare versatility. The son of Holocaust survivors, he began on recorder and clarinet before switching to the violin at eight, and his gifts were spotted by Isaac Stern and Pablo Casals, who arranged for him to study in New York at the Juilliard School under the legendary teacher Ivan Galamian. He shared the Leventritt Competition prize with Kyung-wha Chung in 1967 and launched an international career that has now spanned more than half a century. Equally celebrated on the viola, Zukerman has long been admired above all for the warmth, breadth, and effortless beauty of his tone, qualities that make him an ideal interpreter of the great Romantic concertos of Bruch, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky. He has also built a substantial parallel career as a conductor, as Music Director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada from 1998 to 2015, and is a devoted teacher.