Born in Siberia in 1971, Vadim Repin was eleven when he won the gold medal in all age categories in the Wienawski Competition and gave his recital debuts in Moscow and St Petersburg. At 14 he made his debuts in Tokyo, Munich, Berlin, Helsinki; a year later in Carnegie Hall. At 17 he was the youngest ever winner of the Reine Elisabeth Concours.
Since then he has performed with all the world’s greatest orchestras and conductors. Among the highlights of his career in the past few seasons have been tours with the London Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev, the NHK Orchestra and Dutoit; a tour of Australia with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski, and acclaimed premières in London, Philadelphia, New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Salle Pleyel in Paris and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw of the violin concerto written for him by Sir James MacMillan, culminating in a BBC Prom at the Royal Albert Hall.
Vadim Repin recorded the great Russian violin concerti by Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky on Warner Classics. For Deutsche Grammophon he recorded the Beethoven Violin Concerto, the Brahms Violin Concerto and Double Concerto (Truls Mørk, cello) with the Gewandhaus Orchester, the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov trios with Mischa Maisky and Lang Lang (which won the Echo Classic) and works by Grieg, Janacek and César Franck with Nikolai Lugansky, which won the 2011 BBC Music Award.
In 2010 he received the Victoire d’Honneur, France’s most prestigious musical award for a lifetime’s dedication to music, and became Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres. In 2014 he became Honorary Professor at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music, and in 2015 at the Shanghai Conservatory, in recognition of his work with young musicians.
In April 2014 Vadim Repin as Artistic Director presented the first Trans-Siberian Festival of the Arts in Novosibirsk, featuring a newly commissioned work Voices of Violin by Benjamin Yussupov and a joint appearance by Vadim Repin and prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova. The Festival was enthusiastically extended in the spring of 2015, this time featuring a newly commissioned violin concerto De Profundis by Lera Auerbach. After the fourth successful Trans-Siberian Festival he joined the Israel Symphony and James Judd with the Trans-Siberian Art Festival in Israel .
The 15/16 season began with concerts in Yerevan, Barcelona, Madrid, Bangkok, Shanghai, Seoul and a tour of European cities with the Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra. He gave the London première of Aphrodite Raickopoulou’s music for the silent film Love (1927) starring Greta Garbo and presented it at his third Trans-Siberian Festival in Novosibirsk. In Mexico he celebrated the 70th anniversary of the University of Mexico’s orchestra. He performed with Martha Argerich at her festival in Japan. In June there were performances of Pas de Deux with Svetlana Zakharova in Korea and Japan and a busy summer which began with the Windsor Festival and the Philharmonia Orchestra. The 16/17 season featured the Sibelius concerto in the Netherlands and Belgium and concerts with orchestra in Montreal, Napoli, Helsinki, Bratislava and London. This summer he gave concerts with the Asian Youth Orchestra and James Judd throughout Europe in August. 2017 is the anniversary of the Russian Revolution and Vadim Repin was invited to participate in a special musical commemoration at the Royal Academy of Arts in London together with Vladimir Ashkenazy and other Russian artists.
Vadim Repin plays on the 1733 ‘Rode’ violin by Antonio Stradivari