Four Named Winners of 2002-03 Concerto Competition
	Back to the main story		JULIA SAKHAROVA Violinist Although still a student, Julia Sakharova has already received critical acclaim. The French publication L'Alsace noted her "incredible temperament, very fine sensitivity [and] remarkable colors." The Rachmaninoff Society Newsletter said her playing "stands out as deeply felt and mature beyond her years," and the Santa Barbara News-Press praised her "very powerful musical personality." In April 2002 Sakharova won the top prize at the 47th Olga Koussevitzky Competition for Strings, held in New York. As part of her prize she will present her New York debut recital in 2003 at Steinway Hall. The Musicians Club of New York is presenting the concert. Sakaharova is a scholarship student and senior violin performance major at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College, where she studies with Milan Vitek. Her other teachers at Oberlin have been Almita and Roland Vamos. During the fall of 2000 she was a featured soloist with the Oberlin Orchestra under the direction of composer and conductor John Williams at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. She was concertmaster of the Oberlin Orchestra during the 2001-02 season, and won - two years in a row - the Louis Kaufman Prize for Outstanding Performance in Chamber Music. She also received the Ernest Hatch Wilkins Memorial Prize in May 2002 and in October 2002 was a winner of the Oberlin Concerto Competition. Sakharova has performed extensively as first violinist of the Erato String Quartet, which won first prize (the Coleman- Barstow Award for Strings) at the Coleman Chamber Ensemble Competition in Pasadena, California, in April 2001. Other appearances with the Erato Quartet include concerts at the Smithsonian Institution, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Chamber Music Society, and the University of Cincinnati. She is featured, with pianist Yung Wook Yoo and cellist Margret Arnadottir, on a compact disc recording of Sergei Rachmaninoff's Elegiaque Piano Trios, released by Tavros Records in 2001. She has participated in numerous music festivals, including those at Colmar, France; "Oberlin in Italy" in Casalmaggiore, Italy; the Verbier Festival and Academy in Switzerland; Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival in Maine; the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara; and the Weathersfield Music Festival in Vermont. Sakharova was born in Zheleznovodsk, Russia, and presented her first public performance, at the age of 8, as soloist with the Moldavian Symphony Orchestra. In 1995 she won first prize in the International Competition for Music of Eastern and Central Europe, and was presented with a bow by Vladimir Spivakov, who chaired the jury. She subsequently performed with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, and has represented the Vladimir Spivakov International Charity Foundation in concerts throughout Russia and in Austria, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Switzerland. In 1999 she graduated from the Central Special Music School, part of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where she studied with Maia Glezarova and Zoia Makhtina.
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