03-06-2025
Violinist Alina Ibragimova
"I want to live every note of the music."
The world is full of exciting young female violinists whose stories are plastered all over social media, their album covers similarly driven by the trend to sex-up attractive young women for marketing purposes.
Alina Ibragimova has quietly followed her own path. Born in the former USSR in 1985 to two top professional musicians, the gifted Alina studied at the Gnessin School in Moscow but then at the age of 10, had to meet the challenges of moving to the UK when her late father, Rinat Ibragimov was appointed principal bass of the London Symphony Orchestra.
Whilst studying at the Yehudi Menuhin School in Surrey, which at the time had little awareness of historical performance practice, she experimented with the music of Bach, developing her own ideas about performing music from the baroque to new commissions, on both modern and period instruments. "Every composer is subject to historical style," she says.
Alina went on to study with a number of pedagogues at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal College of Music, including baroque specialist Adrian Butterfield, and she also had private studies with Christian Tetzlaff.
After winning the LSO scholarship aged 17, she was selected as a BBC New Generation Artist from 2005 for two years, where she met her long-time duo partner, French pianist Cédric Tiberghien.
That same year, 2005, she founded her trail-blazing period-instrument ensemble, the Chiaroscuro Quartet, which specialises in music from the classical and early romantic periods played on gut strings with historical bows.
Their performances of Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann and Beethoven drawing comments like: "A shock to the ears of the best kind," from one UK critic.
Speaking of the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 95 Alina responds: "This is music that was designed to shock. But often it's made to sound too perfect."
Signed to the Hyperion label in 2007, Alina nailed her adventurous colours to the mast with two early albums devoted to Karl Amadeus Hartmann and Nikolay Roslavets, whose music was suppressed and name expunged by the Soviets.
Richard Morrison, writing in The Times said "Alina is destined to be a force in the classical music firmament for decades to come… you feel that you are getting the music straight from the composer's quill."
To date her discography ranges from Bach to the new concerto written for her by Huw Watkins, which she premiered at the BBC Proms in 2010.
Her 2020 album of Shostakovich violin concertos with Vladimir Jurowski and the Evgeny Svetlanov State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia, which followed a tour there, won a Gramophone Award and Diapason d'Or, and was one of The Times Discs of the Year.
"I'd like it if promoters would not close their eyes to different repertoire. I hate the notion that many musicians have to play programmes that 'sell better'. There's so much great music out there and it just needs to be given the chance. Once it is, it'll be loved."
Alina's many accolades include two Royal Philharmonic Society awards and an MBE in the 2016 New Year Honours List.
"There was always music in my family, so I found it strange with friends who didn't play an instrument. I didn't understand what they did with their time every day."
Alina was born in Povlevskov, in the then USSR, in 1985 near the city of Ekaterinburg, about 1,000 miles east of Moscow on the edge of the Ural Mountains.
"It's a completely different culture with its own language and food, and everything. In fact, the TV in Kazan is in Tatar and the language is not similar to Russian at all — if anything it more resembles Turkish."
Music surrounded her from birth. Her late father, Rinat Ibragimov, was the award winning principal bass of the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra of the Bolshoi Ballet and Opera and a member of many other ensembles, and her mother Lyutsia Ibragimova, a leading Soviet violinist.
Alina took up the violin when she was four. "I asked my parents for a green violin and then I burst into tears when they gave me one that was brown," recalls Alina. "The sound was revolting but I came back to it six months later."
Within a year she was playing as a soloist with the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra.
Alina has warm memories of her early childhood, especially the woods and her grandmother's cooking. "Although we lived in a tiny flat with a lot of people and cats, I never felt I lacked anything."
Soon, in addition to learning from her mother, Alina was taking lessons at the renowned Gnesin Specialist Music School in Moscow with Valentina Korolkova. The Russian school with its emphasis on discipline, "definitely taught me how to practise," she says.
Her mother was a major role model. "She made me listen to a lot of violinists. I remember listening to Menuhin's recording of the Beethoven concerto on a cassette, and Jascha Heifetz, and Vadim Repin. And I guess being a girl, I wanted to be Anne-Sophie Mutter.'
When Alina was 10, her father was offered the position of Principal Double Bass with the LSO and after a year's trial he was given a contract and the family moved to London in 1996.
Alina wasn't keen to leave her homeland but says she later changed her mind. "Arriving in Britain, everything was very green, it was the middle of summer and I had my own room in the house."
"My education was always about not being 'successful' but about doing your best, being honest and achieving something in yourself that's good."
In the UK her mother became a professor at both the Yehudi Menuhin School and the Royal College of Music in London. Alina, too, began her studies at the Menuhin with Natasha Boyarshaya.
The hothouse atmosphere there seems to suit her. "It's very intense. You become like a family; you get to know everyone so well."
As a teenager, Alina worked incredibly hard to find her own pathway forward as a violinist. "It's a tough world for someone starting out so young. Many people want to pull you in certain directions and it's hard to be strong enough to know what you want straight away.
"My education was always about not being 'successful' but about doing your best, being honest and achieving something in yourself that's good."
A contemporary of Nicola Benedetti, they played Bach's Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra in D minor under Menuhin as conductor, and played a part of the same work at his funeral three weeks later.
At the Royal College of Music Alina began entering competitions, commenting "it was very good for me at the time, but I just didn't always like the atmosphere."
Her most potent success was winning the London Symphony Orchestra Music Scholarship when she was 17.
"It's not really like a normal competition because they also got you to play chamber music with the other candidates. You also get coaching sessions, there are master classes and you also get to lead the orchestra. So it's a very balanced and well-rounded thing."
Then, following a searing performance of a Mozart concerto leading the Kremerata Baltica she was selected as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist from 2005-7.
A little like New York's Young Concert Artists scheme, it gave her management advice, and crucially many performance opportunities, including concerts with the five BBC Orchestras.
"I don't remember learning so much new stuff in such a short period of time before. We did some recitals and chamber music [too] with the other members of the scheme."
Violinist Alina Ibragimova. ( Eva Vermandel. )
"It's the feeling that we can totally trust each other no matter what."
In 2005, when they were both part of the BBC New Generations Artists Scheme, Alina met her long-standing recital partner — French pianist Cédric Tiberghien.
"We have a mysterious alchemy," he says. "It's something natural, something that imposed itself — there are many aspects of the music that we don't talk about — because we feel them immediately. It's the feeling that we can totally trust each other no matter what."
"As far as style is concerned, we each have our own history and background. Alina comes from the baroque repertoire, which has influenced me in my personal playing and contributed to my artistic development. There are balances that are found naturally and implicitly. Our main discussions are whether we should play certain works on period instruments."
The duo has been applauded all over the world and is a regular guest of the Wigmore Hall in London, where it presented an acclaimed complete cycle of the Beethoven violin sonatas in the 2009-10 season. This was followed in 2015-16 by a series of five concerts as part of the Hall's "The Mozart Odyssey" series which saw them perform his complete sonatas for violin and piano, which they've gone on to record.
"When I play, I don't feel it's my performance or my music. It's a communal thing."
Her award-winning Chiaroscuro Quartet owes its origins to Mozart too.
At the Royal College of Music in 2005, she brought together a group of like-minded fellow students to celebrate the then up-coming 250th anniversary of the composer's birth in 2006.
Under the guiding hand of Sir Roger Norrington, Alina prepared one of Mozart's quartets and after the project, Alina decided as it had gone so well, they should continue.
It's an ensemble that continues to defy expectations. They utilise some historical practices like a sparing use of vibrato, but not to the detriment of a modern playing approach.
The Chiaroscuro are in huge demand in concert halls and at festivals all over the world. They've just played in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, so hopefully they will tour in Australia soon, and audiences I know can't wait for Alina to return. She last visited in 2018 as the compelling guest director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. I'll never forget their performance of Schubert's Death and the Maiden .
"When I play, I don't feel it's my performance or my music. It's a communal thing. It's as if I am the audience, and they are me. We're all in it together. It's not about me or the audience, it's about the music."
