Rector
Professor
Head of the Violin and viola department
Soloist and Artistic Director of the String Ensemble “Soloists of St.Petersburg”

Mikhail Gantvarg, a leading violinist of St.Petersburg for the last few decades, is a very noticeable and original person in the city music life. He has passed through quite a typical way for a modern artist. After winning a prize at the Paganini International Competition in youth, he was combining an intensive concert work together with being a principal violin in the St.Petersburg Philarmony Symphonic Orchestra directed by Yury Temirkanov.

Together with that, he has started his teaching career in the St.Petersburg State Conservatory. To the time of the Ensemble “Soloists of Saint Petersburg” was created, M. Gantvarg was already a mature and well-known artist with his own creative outlook and performance style. He is one of the last successors of the legendary St.Petersburg violin school, which gave birth to a whole "constellation" of world famous violinists. Trying to keep its best traditions, M. Gantvarg is always in the search of new ways of expression, sometimes coming to non-traditional, even paradoxical performance solutions. His generous and "classic" playing' manner, is combined with the creative freedom and improvising bits and total absence of routine. He is always in the process of co-creation with an author of the music he plays.

Mikhail Gantvarg and "Soloists of St.Petersburg" have recorded and released more then 40 CDs, containing such capital works as "All Piano and Violin Mozart concertos", monumental works by Vivaldi: "Harmonic Inspiration", "Fancies", "Four Seasons", unique by it's technical difficulties Beethoven's "Great Fugue", Six Sonatas by Rossini, a series of Bach's instrumental concertos, etc.

Since 2011 Prof. Gantvarg is a Rector of St.Petersburg Conservatory.