"MESMERIZING!" "TIGER-LIKE FEROCITY!" - Fanfare Magazine
"MESMERIZING!" "TIGER-LIKE FEROCITY!" - Fanfare Magazine
A concert violinist since the age of 4, and acclaimed by American Record Guide as "marvelous in the Heifetz tradition", Elmira Darvarova is an award-winning recording artist (Gold Medal at the Global Music Awards in 2 consecutive years - 2017 and 2018), nominated for Latin Grammy®, and a multiple-Grammy® winner (as a former concertmaster of The Metropolitan Opera). Darvarova caused a sensation, becoming the first ever (and the only, as of 2026) female concertmaster in the entire history of the Metropolitan Opera. With the MET Orchestra she toured Europe, Japan and the United States, and was heard on the MET's live weekly international radio broadcasts, television broadcasts, CDs and laser discs on the Sony, Deutsche Grammophon and EMI labels. At the Metropolitan Opera she has worked with the greatest conductors of our time, including the legendary Carlos Kleiber. She studied with Yfrah Neaman at the Guildhall School in London (as a British Council scholar), with Josef Gingold at Indiana University in Bloomington (as one of his assistants), and, privately, with Henryk Szeryng. She is a Fellow of the Guildhall School of Music, where a scholarship bearing Elmira Darvarova’s name is being awarded annually. An award-winning artist (Gold Medal at the 2017 & 2018 Global Music Awards, the Gold Quill Award by Classic FM Radio, and the Boris Christoff Medal, among many other awards and distinctions), Elmira Darvarova is a prolific recording artist and can be heard on numerous CDs (fifty to date), recorded for a number of labels (notable album releases include the world-premiere recording of Vernon Duke's violin concerto with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, and a CD with world-premiere recordings of chamber music by René de Castéra, named by Music-Web International a Record of the Year). Elmira Darvarova’s albums have entered the Billboard Charts, most recently at the No. 3 position. Her CDs have won critical acclaim in such esteemed publications as The Strad, Gramophone, American Record Guide, Fanfare, BBC Music Magazine, Klassic Heute, Ritmo, and several of her albums have been selected as Record of the Month or Not-to-be-Missed. She has appeared in recitals and as soloist on five continents, and has performed concertos with the Moscow State Symphony, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony, and with numerous orchestras on three continents. She has performed on the world’s most prestigious stages, such as Carnegie Hall, Avery Fischer/ David Geffen Hall, Alice Tully Hall and Symphony Space in New York; Symphony Hall in Chicago; Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco; Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto; Suntory Hall, Bunka Kaikan and NHK Hall in Tokyo; Musikverein in Vienna; Cadogan Hall in London; Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford; Konserthuset in Stockholm; Victoria Hall in Geneva; Smetana Hall in Prague; Megaron in Athens; Palau de la Musica Catalana in Barcelona; Alte Oper in Frankfurt; Kölner Philharmonie; Mumbai's National Center for Performing Arts; Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall; Saint Petersburg Philharmonia, among many others. She has given recitals and master classes at numerous festivals and at many music schools worldwide. She has partnered for chamber music performances with James Levine, János Starker, Gary Karr, Pascal Rogé, Vassily Lobanov, with tango and jazz legends such as Octavio Brunetti, Fernando Otero and David Amram, and with the world-renowned Indian classical musician - the superstar of the Sarod - Amjad Ali Khan, with whom she recorded a trilogy of CD albums, based on traditional Indian Ragas (released in the United States, and separately, on the Indian sub-continent, home to 1.9 billion people). Their CD album "Masterpieces for Sarod & Violin" entered the Billboard Classical Charts at No. 3 and was lauded by the highly-respected world-music magazine Songlines as one of the best "East Meets West" collaborations in a long tradition which includes also Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar. Elmira Darvarova recorded 2 CDs of Baroque music (world-premiere recordings) with the world's most renowned double bassist Gary Karr, and she performed with him Bottesini's Gran Duo Concertante in the United States and Canada. She has recorded 4 CDs of music by Astor Piazzolla, two of them with the late Argentine-born tango pianist and arranger Octavio Brunetti (named by the New York Philharmonic "the inheritor of Piazzolla's mantle"), and she performed in a duo with Octavio Brunetti at festivals in the U.S. and Europe. Elmira Darvarova is a high-octane performer of Piazzolla compositions, as verified by millions of Spotify listeners. For the Naxos label she recently recorded an album of music by David Amram (released by Naxos in 2025), which includes Amram's newest violin composition "Voyages", written for, and dedicated to Elmira Darvarova. Also for the Naxos label, she has recorded 3 albums of chamber music by Franco Alfano, comprising Alfano's entire chamber music output (all world-premiere recordings), and the latest of the Alfano "installments" - his previously unrecorded string quartets - earned praise as "one of the best recent Naxos releases". She can also be heard on world-premiere recordings of chamber music by René de Castéra, and by Émile Goué, on 2 albums recorded by the French label Azur Classical. For the German label Solo Musica she has recorded 2 albums: the complete Brahms Sonatas, together with pianist Zhen Chen, and masterpieces by Brahms, Franck, Clara Schumann with the world-renowned Russian pianist Vassily Lobanov (a former piano-duo partner of the legendary Sviatoslav Richter), including the world-premiere recording of Lobanov’s Violin Sonata.
For the Urlicht AudioVisual label she has recorded a number of albums, including the acclaimed (in Gramophone Magazine, Strad Magazine, and in American Record Guide, which applauded her as "a marvelous violinist in the Heifetz tradition") world-premiere recording of the (written for Heifetz) violin concerto by Vernon Duke (with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony), a highly-praised recording of the Brahms Horn Trio with the former principal horn of The New York Philharmonic Philip Myers, the violin sonata of Amanda Maier (with renowned pianist Bryan Wagorn), a Poulenc disc with the distinguished French pianist Pascal Rogé, 2 CDs with Gary Karr, a Piazzolla album with Octavio Brunetti, an all-Amram album with live recordings, the solo violin album "Violin Declamations from the Twilight of the Workers' Paradise", in addition to several albums with the New York Piano Quartet (of which she is a founding member), and the Kodály Duo, recorded live with János Starker in a sublime partnership which elicited an avalanche of sensational reviews hailing it as "the epitome of two powerful musicians as absolute equals".
For the Affetto/Naxos label she has recorded numerous albums (abounding with world-premiere recordings), including “Music from Five Centuries", "Masterpieces by Beethoven, Franck, Clara Schumann" (with Japanese-Canadian pianist Shoko Inoue), "David Amram - So in America“, with the participation of David Amram and film-star Estelle Parsons (Oscar-winner, "Bonnie and Clyde"), "Astor Piazzolla - Genius of Tango" (one of the most-requested on Spotify), “Music by Women”, "American Music for Violin & Horn", two Ysaÿe albums ("Homage to Eugéne Ysaÿe" and "The Genius of Ysaÿe"), "Music by Phillip Ramey" (which debuted as No. 1 best-seller in Chamber Music on Amazon, and also entered the Billboard Charts), "Horn Trios by Brahms, Kahn, Koechlin and Dubois", plus three volumes of the anthology "Horn Trios from Mozart to Piazzolla and beyond" (critically-acclaimed double-CD albums which have been broadcast in programs of BBC Radio London and ABC Radio in Australia), an album of Hungarian composers ("From Liszt to Ligeti"), the 2026 violin & horn duo-album "Kaleidoscope - Music from a Thousand Years", and a disc with chamber works by José Serebrier, whose composition "Nostalgia" was transcribed and interpreted for solo violin by Elmira Darvarova at the composer's request.
She also recorded, for the Siderata label, the album “Can You Hear the Flowers” with Argentine-born Grammy®-winning pianist & composer Fernando Otero, with whom she has performed on 2 continents, and who has dedicated to her 6 compositions for solo violin. Many other composers have dedicated works to Elmira Darvarova, most notably David Amram, José Serebrier, Wang Jie, Phillip Ramey, Dmitri Smirnov, Vassily Lobanov, Francine Trester, Paul Chihara, Yui Kitamura, Sean Hickey, Zhen Chen, Konstantin Soukhovetski, Stephen Brown, and others. Elmira Darvarova registered the world-premiere recordings of Elena Firsova's works "Fantasia for solo violin" and "Memoria", and she also presented the world-premiere performance of Firsova's "Memoria" in 2020 in New York. Elmira Darvarova has participated in high-profile world-premiere performances of chamber music by Nikolai Kapustin and David Baker, and in the American premiere of György Ligeti's newly-discovered Duo for Violin & Piano (with pianist Thomas Weaver). Elmira Darvarova was among the first violinists to perform Amanda Maier's Violin Sonata at Stockholm's Konserthuset in Amanda Maier's country of birth. Elmira Darvarova has recorded live for Radio Innsbruck in Austria, as well as for Radio Suisse Romande in Switzerland. Her recital at Béla Bartók's memorial house in Budapest was broadcast live throughout Europe. A documentary film about her life and career was shown on European television. She performs in a duo with Grammy®-winner, pianist & composer Fernando Otero, and she is a founding member of the New York Piano Quartet, the Delphinium Trio, the Quinteto del Fuego and the Amram Ensemble. She is Jury President of several international chamber music competitions in Europe, and she is the President, CEO and Artistic Director of the New York Chamber Music Festival. Praised by Gramophone Magazine for her "ultra-impassioned performances", and in The Strad for her “intoxicating tonal beauty and beguilingly sensuous phrasing" and "silky-smooth voluptuous tone”, she was featured in Gramophone Magazine with an interview about her world-premiere recording of Vernon Duke's violin concerto (written for Heifetz in 1940), which she recorded with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. She has also been featured with numerous interviews in Fanfare, and has been interviewed live at radio stations in the United States, Canada, South America, Europe, India and Japan.
In addition to championing music by Vernon Duke, Franco Alfano, David Amram, Phillip Ramey, René de Castéra, Émile Goué, Amanda Maier, Errollyn Wallen, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Jacobo Cervetto, Francois Barthélemon, Marin Marais, Louis-Gabriel Guillemain, Pierre de Breville, Charles-Marie Widor, Theodore Dubois, Charles Koechlin, Astor Piazzolla, George Gershwin, Francis Poulenc, José Serebrier, Vassily Lobanov, Elena Firsova, Dmitri Smirnov, Rebecca Clarke, Sylvie Bodorova, Amy Beach, Wang Jie, Hildegard von Bingen, Francesca Caccini, Antonia Bembo, Elisabeth de La Guerre, Mary Howe, Dolores White, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Jan Bach, Stephen Brown, Gernot Wolfgang, Fernando Otero, Norman Zocher, Konstantin Soukhovetski, Luis Anjos Teixeira, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Erroll Garner, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, and many others, she has also premiered and/or recorded solo and chamber music by Eugene Ysaÿe, Nikolai Kapustin, David Baker, Erich Korngold, Joseph Marx, Georgy Catoire, Aram Khachaturian, Alfred Schnittke, György Ligeti, Paul Chihara, Andrew Rudin, Richard Bissill, Thomas Weaver, Grigory Zaborov, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Sean Hickey, Francine Trester, Yui Kitamura, Zhen Chen, Ioan Dobrinescu, Daniel Powers, Eino Tamberg, Jiři Pazour, Josef Rheinberger, Plamen Prodanov, Nikolai Badinski, Elizabeth Raum, Amjad Ali Khan, Joseph Summer, Catherine Likhuta, Dobrinka Tabakova, Carsten Bo Eriksen, among numerous others (and in addition to recordings of beloved masterpieces by Bach, Handel, Telemann, Rameau, Couperin, Biber, Leclair, de Machaut, Purcell, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bártok, Kodály, Hindemith, Massenet, Gounod, Albeniz, de Falla, Clara Schumann and César Franck).
Not specializing in any particular music genre, Elmira Darvarova instead chooses to be a top interpreter in a vast variety of styles and epochs, not only strictly-classical, but also in the realm of jazz, blues, tango, folk music. Her Mozart interpretation was lauded by Igor Oistrakh in the most eminent Russian musical publication, while the Chicago Tribune reviewed her Mozart performance in a write-up under the title "A Night to Remember". The New York Times extolled her affinity for Debussy and Ravel. Her rendition of the Brahms Horn Trio (recorded together with the former Principal Horn of the New York Philharmonic Philip Myers, and pianist & MET Opera conductor Bryan Wagorn) has been hailed as belonging in the same league as the iconic 1960s Myron Bloom recording. The Spanish music publication Ritmo defined Darvarova's Brahms Sonatas album (with pianist Zhen Chen) as an “exceptionally-expressive flight to the heights of classic interpretations of music which was born to be understood this way”. Her latest recorded rendition of Ysaÿe's "Ballade" was praised by the eminent critic Henry Vogel as breathtaking and among the best. Reviews of the Franco Alfano recordings raved that "the performances are wondrously fervent, the sound is at your throat, heated and upon you with tiger-like ferocity". Elmira Darvarova's interpretation of the Kodály Duo with legendary cellist János Starker has been unanimously recognized in the press as "spellbinding", "electrifying", "the epitome of two powerful musicians as absolute equals", "edge-of-the-seat performance", "thrilling", "astonishing", "the finest performance of the Kodály Duo" and many other accolades. A reviewer also stated: "I have heard the Kodály Duo played with comparable virtuosity by Heifetz and Piatigorsky, but the exposed, almost wounded, rendition by Darvarova and Starker practically impales the listener for the duration of the performance".
In addition to her concert instruments, Elmira Darvarova also owns a Stroh violin - the unique string instrument that looks like a cross between a violin and a trumpet, which was seen in the nightclub band featured on the HBO series "Boardwalk Empire". Invented in 1899 with the goal of making an instrument that would project more in larger venues, the Stroh violin was also a popular choice for recording during the acoustic era - including classical music repertoire! The instrument is an appropriate choice for much early 20th century repertoire for music halls, the theater, and salon orchestra - and has been used on recent recordings by artists as diverse as Tom Waits and Shakira.
PHOTO by JIYANG CHEN