Great Guild Hall

Dmitry Sitkovetsky (violin, USA)

&

Tallinn Chamber Orchestra

Program – Bach, Tartini, Stravinsky, Pärt, Schostakovitch                    

Dmitry Sitkovetsky is one of a rare breed of artist whose career successfully manifests itself in a number of different artistic ways. As a violinist, he has worked with the very best orchestras in the world - the Berlin Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus, London Symphony, Philharmonia, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York Philharmonic and Cleveland Orchestras. He has also performed at the Salzburg Festival and at the Lucerne, Edinburgh, Verbier, Ravinia and Mostly Mozart festivals, as well as being a regular visitor to the BBC Proms. Sitkovetsky is a committed chamber musician and recitalist and maintains a high profile as such across the United States and Europe and the Far East.

Over the past few years, Dmitry Sitkovetsky has built a flourishing conducting career. He is Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Ulster Orchestra, with which he has toured widely to cities including Madrid, Amsterdam, Munich, Stuttgart, and to Hong Kong for a 6 concert residency. In May 2000, he conducted a major UK tour with Lynn Harrell as soloist.

Sitkovetsky is also the founding director of the NES Chamber Orchestra which comprises distinguished string players from East and West. Together they have made a number of tours to festivals and venues throughout Europe and the United States and have made several recordings including the highly praised string orchestra transcription by Sitkovetsky of Bach's Goldberg Variations. "Bach-Sitkovetsky could arrive at a place in the annals of transcription next to Bach-Busoni and Bach-Stokowski" (New Yorker).

He also works extensively as a guest conductor with many orchestras including the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, BBC Philharmonic, MDR Leipzig and the NDR Hanover, Academia di Santa Cæcilia, Bergen and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestras, Stuttgart, Munich, Los Angeles and St. Paul Chamber Orchestras. In the 2000/2001 season he will conduct Dallas, Indianapolis, New World, Seattle and St. Louis Symphonies.

Dmitry Sitkovetsky has been a highly successful festival director over many years and in '99/'00, he inaugurated the Baku Festival, Azerbaijan. This is a bi-annual festival in which he appears as conductor and soloist with the NES Chamber Orchestra as well as playing chamber music with many of his long-standing and distinguished fellow musicians.

He has an active and varied recording career with an extensive discography. He has recorded all the major violin concerti including particularly distinguished recordings of the Bartok, Shostakovich and Prokofiev concerti. The latest release is of the Sibelius and Tchaikovsky concerti with the Academy of St. Martin in the fields and Neville Marriner with whom he previously recorded the Beethoven, Brahms and Mendelssohn concerti: "Has there ever been a performance that combines so successfully a romantic personal with a classical objective point of view? Or individualistic virtuosity with utter subjection to the spirit of the work? If so, I haven’t heard it. ...every work he approaches emerges with a new vitality...Urgently recommended" (Fanfare)

Dmitry Sitkovetsky is also engaged on a multi-record project with the Ulster Orchestra for BMG/Conifer/Classic FM conducting the symphonies of Mendelssohn, Sibelius and Bizet. The first release of Mendelssohn Symphonies No. 3 and 4 was very well received: "In a way that challenges and generally outshines the many rival discs... Sitkovetsky consistently conveys the feeling of a live performance caught on the wing" (The Gramophone)

In the past couple of seasons, Dmitry Sitkovetsky worked with a range of exceptional orchestras and conductors - the Pittsburgh Symphony with Mariss Jansons, Montreal Symphony and Charles Dutoit, Munich Philharmonic with Krzystof Penderecki, St Petersburg Philharmonic with Yuri Temirkanov, Leipzig Gewandhaus with Herbert Blomstedt, Tonhalle Zurich with Marek Janowski, and the London Philharmonic with Wolfgang Sawallisch.

Tallinn Chamber Orchestra (TCO) was founded in 1993. The conductor Tõnu Kaljuste has bounded the widely well-known Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (EPCC) activities with Tallinn Chamber Orchestra activities. This has turned out to be the beginning of official activities of the Orchestra. The members of the orchestra are all outstanding musicians, who often perform as soloists and are invited to perform with various other orchestras and ensembles.

In 1993, EPCC and TCO produced a CD-record “Te Deum” of works of Arvo Pärt for a record company ECM. For a year, this record has been on the world’s Top Ten list and has gained exalting appraisals from the critics. In 1996 two other records which are extremely important to Tallinn Chamber Orchestra were released by ECM. One of them is “Chrystallisatio”, works by Erkki-Sven Tüür (performs also Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir) and another one is “Litany”, works by Arvo Pärt (co-performers The Hilliard Ensemble, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra). Another record by ECM “Neenia” released in 2001 is music for strings of Heino Eller (recorded in Estonian Concert Hall in 1999). Erkki-Sven Tüür has dedicated his “Show for Chamber

Orchestra” to Tallinn Chamber Orchestra.

In 1999 two videos were prepared together with Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir: “Te Deum” by Arvo Pärt for the company Reiner Moritz Associates (London) and “Requiem” by W.A. Mozart for

Finnish MTV3.

Tallinn Chamber Orchestra has performed together with Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir in many prestigious music festivals: Bach Cantatas Festival in Milan (1996, 1997), Bremen Music Festival (1998), Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music (1998) etc. Concert tours have taken orchestra and the choir to Canada, USA, Japan and to many European countries.