Jury

Misha Nodelman is a master violinist who joined the Russian musical elite at an early age. His effortless masterful violin playing and deep musicality makes every concert with him an event. Misha Nodelman is first concertmaster of the New Philharmonic Orchestra of Westphalia, an international prize winner and has been teaching as an assistant to Prof. Zakhar Bron in Cologne since 2006.

Misha Nodelman was born in 1977 in St. Petersburg into a family of musicians. He attracted attention at an early age due to his extraordinary talent. After winning first prize at the Young Talents Competition in St. Petersburg, he received top-class Russian violin training at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, first at the special music school there for highly gifted children, then under Prof. Ovcharek.
During this time he became the winner of the violin competition of the “Gartow Foundation” St. Petersburg. With the string quartet “Modus” he won the third prize at the competition of the Munich Concert Association. He was also a member of the chamber orchestra “Saint-Petersburg Kamerata” under Saulius Sondeckies.

His path then led him to one of the most famous violin teachers of our time, Zakhar Bron in Cologne.
During this period he became a laureate of the 1st International Liana Issakadze Violin Competition and received the first prize as well as the special prize at the International Violin Competition Eurasia-2. He became a scholarship holder of the Oscar and Vera Ritter Foundation. Misha Nodelman completed his studies with the concert exam.

Misha Nodelman performs regularly as a soloist and chamber musician. As concertmaster of the Neue Philharmonie Westfalen, he is familiar with the workings of a large orchestra. An experience that makes him even more valuable as a soloist.
He leads the Nodelman Quartet, which brilliantly and expressively interprets classical music literature.
In the meantime, the Nodelman Quartet is one of the best string quartets in Germany. In addition to the concert stage, the Nodelman Quartet repeatedly stands out through peace projects, such as the nationally acclaimed multimedia project “Threnody for the Victims of Ukraine”, or “Klingende Stolpersteine”, an artistic project of the Nodelman Quartet against forgetting.

Since winter semester 2022/23, Misha Nodelman is a lecturer for violin at the International Music Academy Anton Rubinstein in Düsseldorf.

Yuri Bondarev, born in St. Petersburg, switched to the viola after studying violin at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin and was accepted into the class of Prof. Tatjana Masurenko at the Leipzig Academy of Music, where he also took his concert exam. Regular solo and chamber music performances have taken him to Austria, Italy, France, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, Holland and Japan. He has played in various ensembles including the Vienna Musikverein, the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Milan Conservatory, the Alte Oper Frankfurt and the Tonhalle Düsseldorf.

He gained his first important orchestral experience with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic with conductors such as Riccardo Chailly, Kurt Masur, Daniel Harding, Dmitrij Kitajenko, Christopher Hogwood, Herbert Blomstedt and others. Since 2009 he has played as deputy principal violist with the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra.

Since 2012 he has been teaching violin, viola and chamber music at the Anton Rubinstein International Music Academy in Düsseldorf.

Michael Blatow is a violinist and graduate of the St Petersburg State Conservatory “N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov”. He was a member of the Aachen Symphony Orchestra from 1981 to 2019.

In 2002, he founded the Anton Rubinstein International Music Academy. During this period, Michael Blatow was able to continuously expand the Academy’s range of Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programmes through collaborations with music academies in Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland. In 2014, he opened a branch of the Anton Rubinstein International Academy of Music in Berlin.