Boris Giltburg

born in Moscow in 1984

Boris Giltburg
(© Sasha Gusov)

Boris Giltburg, who had moved with his family from Moscow to Tel Aviv at a young age, was first taught by his own mother and then by Arie Vardie as his first official teacher. His international recognition and career started shortly after winning the 2002 Santander Competition and experienced a huge upswing thanks to gaining second place and the audience prize at the 2011 Rubinstein Competition.

Prior to 2011, Boris Giltburg had already performed with well-known orchestras, such as the London Philharmonia Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. His debut at the BBC Proms had been as early as 2010. In 2013, he sovereignly won the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, after which there was one performance after the other at the world’s most famous concert halls, inter alia, at the Musikverein concert hall in Vienna, the Gewandhaus concert hall in Leipzig, the London Southbank Centre and the Teatro Colón opera house in Buenos Aires, and he has been invited to festivals as a soloist at concerts of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra.

Highlights of the 2014/15 season were, inter alia, his debuts with the NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, and his solo concert debuts at the Toppan Hall in Tokyo and at the large hall of the Centre for Fine Arts (Bozar) in Brussels. The conductors with whom Giltburg has worked include well-known names, such as Alsop, Dohnanyi, Gimeno, Lintu and Petrenko. 2015 saw the beginning of his cooperation with Naxos Records with the release of a brilliant Schumann CD, soon followed by a Beethoven CD, which were both received with great interest by international critics. In December 2015, Boris Giltburg became a member of the Schumann Forum, the Board of Artists of the Schumann Network, and he also responded to questions by Dr Christoph Vratz within the scope of a Schumann Forum lecture recital held at the Bonn Schumann House on 17.12.2015, cf. https://youtu.be/08628KlUptE

Boris Giltburg is also a wonderful music teacher. To the delight of the audience, he loves explaining musical contexts and for this purpose even runs a blog “Classical music for all” - Boris Giltburg’s blog: https://borisgiltburg.wordpress.com/, and a Facebook page run by him in a very communicative manner: https://www.facebook.com/Giltburg/

“The give and take of the music’s pulse is naturally felt, as is the spectrum of tonal and dynamic shading... Giltburg has the capacity to identify with and encapsulate the moods of each piece while artlessly crafting them into a shapely span.”

Daily Telegraph, February 2015

CD-Recordings of works by Schumann