Vienna Symphony Orchestra Hires Two New Concertmasters

Violinists Kirill Maximov and Dumitru Pocitari will join the orchestra over the coming year

Having recently won the audition for the position of first concertmaster of the Wiener Symphoniker, Moldovan violinists Kirill Maximov and Dumitru Pocitari will take up the position in the course of the coming year.

They will join first concertmasters Dalibor Karvay, who began the role in March 2020, and Anton Sorokow, who has served the same position since 2005.

The first concertmaster of the Tonkünstler Orchestra since 2017, Maximov was born in Chișinău and began his first violin lessons at the age of five with Alla Guseva at the Sergei Rachmaninov Special Music School. 

A graduate of the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, his mentors have also included Robert Papavrami, Dora Schwarzberg, Koichiro Harada, Marianne Piketty, Taras Gabora, Lothar Strauß, Igor Ozim, Hubert Kroisamer, and Krzysztof Węgrzyn. 

He has been a prize winner at the Mykola Lysenko Music Competition, Villa de Llanes Violin Competition, Bulgaria’s Competition Young Virtuosos, Stefanie Hohl Violin Competition, and the Fritz Kreisler Violin Competition.

Born in 1991, Pocitari started his music studies at the age of seven. A member of the Israel Philharmonic since 2014, he was appointed as concertmaster in 2019. 

Between 2000 and 2012, he won prizes and medals at international violin competitions in Romania, Kazakhstan, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine, as well as second prize at the 2012 Buchmann-Mehta School of Music Competition. 

Having participated in international music festivals across Belarus and Moscow, his mentors have included Phillipe Bride, Bujor Prelipcean, Serban Lupu, Zakhar Bron, Julian Rachlin, Alexandra Soumm, Nikolaj Znaider, and Pinchas Zukerman. 

“Good news from the orchestra! The big [first concertmaster] audition last week was crowned with double success!” the symphony wrote on social media. “It is our great pleasure to welcome two musicians of international standing. We congratulate Dumitru Pocitari and Kirill Maximov and look forward to making music together!”

“I am extremely happy that [Maximov and Pocitari] were able to win the audition for the position of 1st Concertmaster,” said the symphony’s artistic director Jan Nast in the press release. “Thanks to their exceptional abilities and special artistic personalities, they will be able to make a valuable contribution to the further artistic development of our orchestra.”