OREST SHOURGOT is a violinist, pedagogue, conductor, chamber musician and since 2022 a full professor at the Academy of Music in Zagreb. He was born in the family of a university professor, Ph.D. Bogdan Shourgot and violinist Volodymyra Shourgot. In 1982, Orest won first prize at a violin competition in Kiev, where he played Henryk Wieniawski’s First Concerto in F minor in the final. The following year, he won first prize at the Kocian competition in what was then Czechoslovakia. In 1989, he graduated from the Central Music School in Moscow and in the same year won the first prize at the international violin competition in Odessa. From 1989 to 1994, he studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow and became concert master of the Contemporary Music Ensemble (ASM) of the Union of Composers of Russia. In 1993, he continued his successful streak by winning first prize at the First Mykola Lysenko International Violin Competition in Kharkiv. In the period from 1994 to 1996, he finished his postgraduate studies at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, where he started working as an assistant in 1995. At the First International Violin Competition in Dubna in 1996, Abram Jampolski won the second prize. During his student days, Orest played in the Moscow Soloists ensemble under the direction of maestro Yuri Bashmet. He has been a scholarship holder of the “Nova imena” foundation under the patronage of Anatoli Karpov and Raisa Gorbachev since 1992.

He came to Croatia in 1997 and acquired Croatian citizenship in 2001. Since 1998 he has been teaching at the Academy of Arts in Split, and in 1999 he was appointed assistant professor at the same institution. Since 2001, he has been concertmaster of the Zagreb Philharmonic. Four years later, in 2005, he was appointed assistant professor at the Academy of Music in Zagreb. In 2011, he was promoted to the title of professor at the same institution. In 2010, he was the artistic director of the Zagreb Chamber Orchestra.

As a soloist and as a member of an ensemble, Orest performed with leading world musicians and conductors, including Sir Neville Marriner, Shlomo Mintz, Yuri Bashmet, Natalia Gutman, Alun Francis, Pavle Dešpalj, Vladimir Kranjčević, Milan Horvat, Hans Graf and many others. . Orest has been performing as a soloist since 1981, and has performed in many European and Asian countries, as well as in the United States. Among the many performances, this is just an illustration of his rich performing career: a Bach double concert with ShlomoMintz and two performances with Roby Lakatos in Zagreb in 2017. In 2016, he performed with the Zagreb Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in New York.

In 2018, Orest became the first violinist in the history of Croatia to perform a complete cycle of three sonatas and three partitas for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach, which he first performed in the church of St. Francis of Assisi in Lipik, and then in the cathedral of St. It’s blowing in Split. For the third time, he performed the cycle in the Church of Saint Mark in Zagreb as part of the Saint Mark Festival and became a laureate of the Festival. Orest is the first violinist to perform Scheherazade of Rimsky Korsakov at the Royal Opera House Concert Hall in Muscat, Oman in December 2018 and at the Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Cultural Center in Kuwait in January 2019. Immediately after the tour in Arab countries, he performed a cycle of six Eugène Ysaÿe’s sonatas in the Great Hall of the Music Institute in Zagreb, making him the only violinist in Croatia to have performed two of the most significant solo violin cycles in one year.

Furthermore, Orest was a member of the jury at numerous international violin competitions, including those in Sion in 2011, Novosibirsk in 2013, Ohrid in 2014, Belgrade in 2015 and 2016, and Lviv in 2017.

In 2011, the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU) granted him the exclusive right to play the King violin from 1735, made by the famous Italian master Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù. In 2015, in Cremona, he played on the violin of A. Stradivari Joachim-MA, made in 1715.

FOR THE CONCERT ORGANISATION AND OTHER DETAILES REGARDING POTENTIAL COOPERATION FEEL FREE TO CONTACT US VIA E-MAIL: valkulture@hi.t-com.hr