Peter Zazofsky
Professor of Music, Violin and Chamber Music; Co-Director, String Quartet Workshop, BU Tanglewood Institute
Violinist Peter Zazofsky has a richly varied career as soloist, chamber musician and educator. He has given solo performances with many of the great orchestras in the U.S. and Europe, including the Boston Symphony, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, Vienna Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra and the Baltimore Symphony. The San Francisco featured him on tour in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and he performed in Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center as soloist with the Danish Radio Orchestra. Further tours throughout Europe, South America, South Korea and Israel were acclaimed for his distinctive interpretations of classic, romantic and 20th Century concerti, in collaboration with eminent maestros- Klaus Tennstedt, Kurt Sanderling, Ozawa, Ormandy, Herbert Blomstedt, Eschenbach, Dutoit and David Zinman.
In addition to his solo work, Mr. Zazofsky tours and records as first violinist of the Muir String Quartet, formerly in residence at the Boston University School of Music. These concerts have included six complete cycles of the Beethoven Quartets, and the great works of Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Dvorak, Bartok and Shostakovich.
At Boston University, Mr. Zazofsky serves as Professor of Violin and Chamber Music, Coordinator for String Chamber Music, and Director of the BUTI String Quartet Workshop.
He also teaches at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School.
Raised in Boston, Peter Zazofsky studied with Joseph Silverstein before attending the Juilliard Pre-College with Dorothy Delay. He then studied at the Curtis Institute, with Ivan Galamian, Arnold Steinhardt and Jaime Laredo, and the Marlboro Summer Festival, where his mentors included Rudolf Serkin, Felix Galimir and Sandor Vegh. Zazofsky came to prominence after winning a series of prizes, including the 1977 Wieniawski Competition, the 1979 Montreal Competition, the 1980 Queen Elisabeth Contest in Brussels, and the 1985 Avery Fisher Career Grant. Since then, he has occasionally served as a judge for those events.
In recent times, Mr. Zazofsky has expanded his activities to include masterclasses in China, and online seminars for teachers in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.
