Mischa Maisky

Advisory Committee, MUSIC FESTIVAL Argerich’ s Meeting Point in Beppu

Mischa Maisky was born in Latvia, educated in Russia, then immigrated to Israel. He has the distinction of being the only cellist in the world to have studied with both Mstislav Rostropovich and Gregor Piatigorsky.
Maisky has been enthusiastically received in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, New York and Tokyo, along with the rest of the major music centers.
He collaborated with such prominent conductors as Leonard Bernstein, Charles Dutoit, Carlo Maria Giulini, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, and Daniel Barenboim, and his partnerships with the world’s top artists have included such artists as Martha Argerich, Evgeny Kissin, Lang Lang, Peter Serkin, Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet, Vadim Repin, Maxim Vengerov, to name just a few.
Maisky considers himself a citizen of the world: “I’m playing an Italian cello, with Austrian and German strings, French and German bows, My six children were born in four different countries. I’m driving an American car, wear a Swiss watch, an Indian necklace and I feel at home everywhere people appreciate and enjoy classical music.”
As an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist for more than thirty years, he has made well over 35 albums, which have been highly rated around the world. Maisky’s recordings have enjoyed world-wide critical acclaim and have been awarded five times the prestigious Record Academy Prize in Tokyo, three times Echo Deutscher Schallplattenpreis, Grand Prix du Disque in Paris as well as the coveted Grammy nominations. In 2021, Maisky released a complete collection of 40 CD recordings from Deutsche Grammophon.
Truly a world-class musician, he has won numerous prizes. In recent years alone, he won the 2018 Istanbul International Music Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, has been named an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music in London in 2019, and an Honorary Member of the Academia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome in 2021.
Maisky plays a 1720 Montagnana cello presented by a philanthropist when he made his debut at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1973.
He visited Japan for the first time in 1986, and since then he has made more than 50 visits to Japan.