Boris Kuschnir

Bor­is Kuschnir was born into a music fam­ily in Kiev in 1948. He stud­ied viol­in with Bor­is Belen­ky at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Con­ser­vatoire and cham­ber music with Valentin Ber­l­in­sky of the Borod­in Quar­tet.

His many encoun­ters with Dmitri Shos­takovich (work­ing on his last quar­tets) and Dav­id Ois­trakh, with whom he also stud­ied, had a last­ing influ­ence on his artist­ic devel­op­ment. His career star­ted 1969 when he was one of the three win­ners of the Allunions-Com­pet­i­tion in Len­in­grad where, in the final, he per­formed the Beeth­oven Viol­in Con­certo with the Len­in­grad Sym­phony Orches­tra under the baton of Yuri Temirkan­ov.

He has won numer­ous prizes at inter­na­tion­al viol­in and cham­ber music competitions (Par­is, Bel­grade, Sion, Trapani, Brat­is­lava, Florence, Trieste, Gorizia, Ham­burg, Ver­celli). In 1970 he foun­ded the Moscow String Quar­tet and remained a mem­ber until 1979.

Since 1981 he has been liv­ing in Aus­tria. He became an Aus­tri­an cit­izen in 1982.  In 1984, he became a Pro­fess­or at the Music and Arts Uni­ver­sity of the City of Vienna and also a dis­tin­guished Pro­fess­or at the Uni­ver­sity of Music and Performing Arts Graz in 1999. His repu­ta­tion as a teach­er won inter­na­tion­al recogni­tion with the recent out­stand­ing suc­cess of his pupils, Juli­an Rachlin, Nikolaj Znaid­er, Sergey Dogad­in, Maria Dueñas, Pavel Mily­ukov, Lidia Baich Dalibor Karvay and Alexandra Sou­mm.

At the same time, he con­stantly gives mas­ter­classes at renowned academies like the Ver­bi­er Fest­iv­al Academy and Kron­berg Academy and is a jury mem­ber of vari­ous inter­na­tion­al music com­pet­i­tions such as Queen Eliza­beth Com­pet­i­tion in Brus­sels, Tchaikovsky Com­pet­i­tion in Moscow, Nic­colò Paganini Com­pet­i­tion in Gen­ua, the Long Thibaud Com­pet­i­tion in Par­is.

In 1984 Bor­is Kuschnir foun­ded the Wien­er Schubert Trio which received many pres­ti­gi­ous awards, among them the Moz­art Inter­pret­a­tion­spre­is 1988 in Vienna and the Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Found­a­tion1990.

Bor­is Kuschnir appears with such illus­tri­ous part­ners as Evgeny Kissin, Elisa­beth Leon­skaja, Bor­is Bere­zovsky, Leif Ove Andsnes, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Juli­an Rach­lin, Nikolaj Znaid­er, Max­im Ven­ger­ov, Renaud Capu­con, Dav­id Gar­rett, Yuri Bash­met, Gérard Caussé, Nobuko Imai, Lawrence Power, Mis­cha Maisky, Bor­is Perga­menschikow, Nat­alia Gut­man, Miklós Per­ényi, Steven Isser­l­is, Gau­ti­er Capuçon, Sol Gabetta. Both as soloist and cham­ber musi­cian Bor­is Kuschnir made numer­ous record­ings, not­ably the com­plete Moz­art piano tri­os for EMI, which were released in the Moz­art year 1991.

In 1993 he foun­ded the Vienna Brahms Trio which made their highly acclaimed debut at the Gidon Kremer’s Lock­en­haus Fest­iv­al in Aus­tria. In 1996, the Trio won First Prize at the 9th Inter­na­tion­al Cham­ber Music Com­pet­i­tion in Illzach, France. Their record­ing of Schumann’s com­plete works for Piano trio was released on the Naxos label in 1999. He was co-founder of the Kopel­man Quar­tet in 2002 with which he is giv­ing con­certs all over the world since and has released CDs at Nimbus Records and Wig­more Hall Live.

In 2008 the Pres­id­ent of the Repub­lic of Aus­tria Dr. Heinz Fisc­her awar­ded Bor­is Kuschnir with the “Grand Dec­or­a­tion of Hon­our in Sil­ver for Ser­vices to the Repub­lic of Aus­tria” and in 2013 with the “Aus­tri­an Cross of Hon­our for Sci­ence and the Arts, First Class”.