Artists

Biography:

French violinist Philippe Graffin began learning the violin with his father, a jazz musician and sculptor. He entered the Marseille Conservatoire, followed by the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 13 in the class of Michèle Auclair. Upon graduating he studied in Bloomington, Indiana, with Josef Gingold, a pupil of Ysaÿe.
Philippe was a laureate of the Fritz Kreisler competition in Austria, where upon hearing him Sir Yehudi Menuhin invited him to make his first recording under his baton.

Graffin’s many highly acclaimed recordings since then bear witness to an ever-questing mind and include many world premieres. He has rediscovered original settings of Chausson’s Poème with string quartet and has championed the forgotten Violin Concertos of Fauré, the pre-Kreisler version of Elgar’s Violin Concerto and the Violin Concerto by English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the world-premiere recording of which he released on AVIE records and performed at the BBC Proms. He has also recorded the world premiere of Ysaÿe’s Solo Sonata Op.27bis, included in his recital with pianist Claire Désert, Fiddler’s Blues, also on AVIE Records.

As a soloist, he has performed with some of the foremost orchestras in Europe: The Philharmonia, BBC Symphony, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken, the Residentie Orkest, Gothenburg Symphony, Czech Philharmonic, Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto, St Petersburg Philharmonic, George Enescu Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Orchestre national d’Île-de-France.

Graffin has had works written for him by Rodion Shchedrin, Vytautas Barkauskas, David Matthews, Philippe Hersant, Yves Prin, Peter Fribbins, Nicola Campogrande and Marcelo Nisinman.

Philippe was the founder and artistic director of ‘Consonances’, a chamber music festival held in St Nazaire, France. He has curated numerous projects at London’s Wigmore

Hall, including a week-long festival devoted to Ysaÿe and his influences. Philippe has shared the stage with some of the great artistic personalities of our time, from Lord Menuhin and Mstislav Rostropovich to the actor Gérard Depardieu, with whom he created a project in Brussels, at Flagey, exploring the relationship between poetry and music, recorded and documented by Belgian Television RTBF.

Philippe Graffin is a professor at Paris’s Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique (CNSM) and at the Royal Conservatoire of Brussels (KCB).