Athens, Ga. – The UGA Performing Arts Center will present the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on March 25 at 3 p.m. in Hodgson Concert Hall. Guest conductor and violinist Leonidas Kavakos will lead the ASO in a program featuring Mozart’s Symphony No. 34 and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4. Maestro Kavakos also will perform as soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3.
While still in his teens, Leonidas Kavakos attracted international attention as a virtuoso violinist when he won the Sibelius Competition in 1985 and, three years later, the Paganini Competition.
Since then, he has performed with the world’s major orchestras, including the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
A native of Athens, Greece, Kavakos is gaining increasing recognition as a conductor of considerable gift and musicianship. He served as artistic director of the Camerata Salzburg from 2007 to 2009 and has since conducted many of the world’s leading orchestras, such as the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, La Scala Filharmonica, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the Houston Symphony Orchestra.
During the 2011-2012 season, he is conducting and playing with the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Maggio Musicale, RAI Torino and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Kavakos boasts a distinguished discography with a number of award-winning recordings. His recording of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto on Sony Classical won Germany’s ECHO Klassik Award for Best Concerto Recording in 2009, and he won the Gramophone Award for the first ever recording of the original version of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto.
Leonidas Kavakos plays the 1724 “Abergavenny” Stradivarius.
Nancy Riley, a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at UGA, will present a pre-concert lecture prior to the ASO performance. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Tickets for the concert are $20 – $55, with special discounts for UGA students. Tickets can be purchased online at pac.uga.edu or by calling the Performing Arts Center box office at 706/542-4400 or toll free at 888/289-8497.
Underwriters for the ASO performance are Athens Home Organizer (Julia Marlowe) and The Law Offices of John F. Lyndon.
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