Michael Kugel
Michael Kugel was born in 1946 in the Soviet Union. He studied the violin at the Beethoven School of Music and at the Kharkov Music College before entering the Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied the viola (with Juri Kramerov), composition and conducting. In 1975 he won First Prize at the International Viola Competition in Budapest (when Yuri Bashmet and Thomas Riebl were also finalists).
In the USSR he was viola soloist with the Moscow Philharmonic Organisation "Mosconcert", violist of the Beethoven Quartet (in succession to Fyodor Drushinin) and Professor at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. From 1990 to 1996 he was professor at the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem. Since 1996 he has been a professor at the Ghent Royal Conservatory (Belgium), and he is now also teaching at the Maastricht Royal Conservatory (the Netherlands).
He has appeared throughout the world as soloist with many major symphony orchestras and as a conductor with many others. In the Soviet Union he made more than twenty discs as violist, and many others as a viola d'amore player and conductor.
Michael Kugel has enriched the viola repertoire not only with his own compositions (a Concerto, a Sonata-Poem for viola solo, Suites for Viola and Piano, and a completion of Paganini's unfinished Carnival of Venice Variations), but with many other arrangements and transcriptions (notably of Waxman's Carmen Fantasy).
He is the author of a book on the Shostakovich Viola Sonata and the Bartok Viola Concerto, History of an Era, Ghent, 2002, with a second in preparation on other works central to the viola repertoire.
Programme
with Timur Sergeyenia (piano)
Sonata for Viola and Piano - Rebecca Clarke
Nature Morte au Panier (world premiere) - Richard Ingham
La Carnevale di Venezia - M. Kugel (da N. Paganini)
Sonata for Viola and Piano, op 147 - Dmitri Shostakovich
Michael Kugel videos
You can hear and watch Michael Kugel playing live two movements (or parts) of his own orchestral arrangement of Shostakovich sonata (opus 147) with the Maastricht Conservatoire Orchestra
He is without doubt one of the great string virtuosos of this century.
The Strad
His tone is remarkably supple and in both hands he possesses the sort of virtuosity associated with names like Heifetz and Kogan.
The Strad
His mastery of the viola is astonishing. He does technical things with a seeming ease that most players would be hard put to imagine. Yet he is a very tasteful musician, capable of great subtlety and sensitivity.
Journal of the American Viola Society
Du must es gesehen haben, um es zu glauben. (You have to see it to believe it.)
Die Viola (Deutsche Viola-Gesellschaft)
Kugel's playing is truly amazing.
Journal of the American Viola Society
Timur Sergeyenia
Timur Sergeyenia was born in Minsk, Belarus in1969. His musical aducation began when he was three years old at a special school for talented children at the National Conservatory Minsk. His teacher was Prof. Vladimir Kuzmenko. At the age of four he gave his first public concert with his own compositions. At seven he performed for the first time as a soloist with the National Chamber Orchestra of Belarus.
He has been educated by outstanding teachers such as, Prof. Irina Tswetajewa, Prof. Valerij Schatskij (National Conservatory Minsk), Prof. Naum Starkman (National Tchaikowsky Conservatory in Moscow) Timur Sergeyenia has been performing in public concerts for 30 years now.
He has given more than 1500 concerts in Germany, England, France, Monaco, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, Lithania, Latvia...
Timur Sergeyenia has successfully combined his concert work with his pedagogical and scientifical activities.
From 1996-1999 he worked as a piano-teacher at the National Conservatory Minsk and at the same music school for talented children he himself had been trained.
From 1995-1998, within the scope of his cooperation with the Institute of Scientific Research for problems of culture at the Academy of Sciences of Republic of Belarus, he wrote a book titled: "The psychological and physical training of musicians for the performance of public concerts".
Since 1999 Timur Sergeyenia has been living and working in Germany.
Mr Kugel is a Russian-born virtuoso who, apart from his facility on the viola, presents a deeply musical as well as intellectual style of playing that one rarely hears today.
Journal of the Canadian Viola Society