Aleksey Semenenko

23-year-old Ukrainian violinist Aleksey Semenenko is praised for performances replete with “verve, wit, delicatesse, and beautiful phrasing” (The Boston Musical Intelligencer). First Prize Winner of the 2012 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, he joins the elite YCA roster and is presented this season in debuts in New York at Merkin Hall, in Washington, DC at the Kennedy Center, and in Boston at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Mr. Semenenko was awarded three concerts: at the Paramount Theatre in Vermont, with the Friends of Music Concerts in Sleepy Hollow, NY, and at the Usedom Music Festival in Germany. This season, he also appears in recital at the Port Washington Library, Rockefeller University, the Vero Beach Museum of Art, the First Presbyterian Church of Myrtle Beach and La Grua Center for the Arts.
Mr. Semenenko has appeared as soloist with orchestras including the Moscow Virtuosi, the Kiev National Orchestra, the Junge Philharmonie in Cologne, and the Sinfonietta Hungarica. In 2007, Mr. Semenenko performed the violin solo from John William’s “Schindler’s List” with the Odessa National Symphony under Hobart Earle in Hamburg. He performed Paganini’s Concerto No. 2 at the 2011 Musik: Landschaft Westfalen Festival with the National Philharmonic of Russia under Vladimir Spivakov. He was subsequently invited by the Spivakov Foundation to perform at the Kremlin in Moscow and the Moscow International Performing Arts Center. A consummate chamber musician, Mr. Semenenko founded the Stolyarsky Quartet, which performed concerts in Russia, the Ukraine, France, Malta, and Switzerland.
At the 2010 International Music Festival in Hesse, Main-Taunus, and Hofheim in Germany, Mr. Semenenko received the Alois Kottmann Award of €3,000. At sixteen, Mr. Semenenko won the Grand Prix of the 2006 National Violin Competition in Lviv in Ukraine. He also won the 2012 European Young Concert Artists Auditions in Leipzig, Germany.
Born in Odessa, Mr. Semenenko began his violin studies at the age of six with Zoya Mertsalova at the Stolyarsky School and only a year later, he performed Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in A minor with the Odessa Philharmonic. He studies with Zakhar Bron at the Hochschule fur Musik in Cologne. He plays a 1720 Dom Nicola Amati violin, on loan from the Sinfonima Foundation of Mannheim, Germany.