Zoltan Despond

Ludwig van Beethoven - Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 5 op. 102 No.

Robert Schumann - Romances for Oboe and Piano, op.

94 (arranged for Cello and Piano). Richard Strauss - Sonata for Cello and Piano in F major op.

Born in 1992, cellist Zoltan Despond studies under Pierre-Bernard Sudan in Fribourg and Marc Jaermann in Lausanne, then under Thomas Grossenbacher at the Hochschule der Künste Zurich, where he obtained a soloist master's degree in

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At the Pavia Cello Academy he benefits from the valuable advice of Enrico Dindo and participates in Master Classes by Antonio Meneses, Christophe Coin and Giovanni Sollima.

His concert tours take him throughout Europe. He enjoys performing with musicians such as Ilya Gringolts, Silvia Simionescu, Marko Milenkovic and Anahit Kurtikyan. He participates in the activities of the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester. Pianist Vesselin Stanev, originally from Varna (Bulgaria), was trained at the Sofia Academy of Music and then under Dmitri Bashkirov at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Alexis Weissenberg and the Paris National Conservatory of Music. He received additional advice from Peter Feuchtwanger in London. He was a laureate of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition and the Marguerite Long – Jacques Thibaud Competition. He regularly performs in major European concert halls, such as Wigmore Hall in London, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Gewandhaus in Leipzig or the Salle Gaveau in Paris. He also visits the Nordic countries, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, Russia and Japan. He particularly cultivates chamber music, for example with violinist Ekaterina Frolova, flutist Eva Oertle or cellist Zoltán Despond. He has recorded numerous CDs for RCA, Sony Classical and the Bulgarian Gega New label.