Alina Ibragimova

A prodigy who attained wide success in her teens and early twenties, violinist Alina Ibragimova has been especially visible as a chamber music player. With pianist Cédric Tiberghien, she has recorded well-regarded cycles of Mozart's and Beethoven's violin-and-piano sonatas. Ibragimova was born in Polevskov, Russia, then part of the USSR, on September 28, 1985. She took up the violin at four, and the following year was moved to the Gnessin State Musical College in Moscow. A year after that came a performance with the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra. Ibragimova's parents were both musicians, and in 1996, her father landed a position as principal double bass with the London Symphony Orchestra. At the same time, her mother became a teacher at the Yehudi Menuhin School, and Ibragimova enrolled there. With prodigy Nicola Benedetti, she performed Bach's Concerto for two violins and orchestra in D minor, BWV 1043, under Menuhin as conductor, and played a part of the same work at his funeral three weeks later. Ibragimova went on to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and then the Royal College of Music in London. She rounded off her education with private lessons from Christian Tetzlaff. In the early 2000s, Ibragimova won several international competitions, and in 2005, she played violin and led the Kremerata Baltica orchestra in a Mozart concerto performance. That propelled her to selection as a BBC New Generation Artist from 2005 to 2007, and since then, she has been widely heard as a soloist and chamber player. Ibragimova has played concertos with several major British orchestras and those abroad, including the Seattle Symphony and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. Ibragimova was signed to the Hyperion label and released her debut there, an album of works by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, in 2007. Active as a duet player with Tiberghien and others, she performed a complete cycle of Beethoven's violin sonatas at Wigmore Hall (recordings were released on the Hall's own label) and has appeared at other high-profile venues, including Vienna's Musikverein, Carnegie Hall, and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Comfortable with both modern and period instruments, she formed the period-instrument string quartet Chiaroscuro with fellow Royal College of Music students and has continued to perform with the group. She has remained on Hyperion's roster, issuing a complete cycle of Mozart violin sonatas and, in 2019, a recording of the Brahms violin sonatas, both with Tiberghien. In 2020, she returned to Russia, recording the Shostakovich violin concertos with the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia "Evgeny Svetlanov" under conductor Vladimir Jurowski, and in 2021, she recorded Paganini's 24 Caprices. Ibragimova released an album of Mendelssohn's complete violin sonatas on Hyperion in 2022. ~ James Manheim, Rovi