Kim Kashkashian

Violist Kim Kashkashian stands among the foremost exponents of her instrument and a steadfast advocate for new music. European composers such as Arvo Pärt and György Kurtág number among those who have composed pieces expressly for her.

She entered the world on August 31, 1952, in Detroit, Michigan, as part of an Armenian immigrant household. Her father, an amateur baritone, took pleasure in performing Armenian folk songs. Kashkashian began violin lessons at age eight yet changed to the viola during her preteen years at Michigan’s Interlochen Music Academy. She pursued studies at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore under Walter Trampler and Karen Tuttle, then completed a master’s degree at the New School of Music in Philadelphia. In 1981 she joined that institution’s faculty and later instructed at the Mannes College of Music in New York and the Indiana University School of Music during the 1980s. Her recording career opened to critical notice in 1984 with a performance of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E flat major, K. 364, alongside violinist Gidon Kremer and the Vienna Philharmonic under Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

The next year she initiated an enduring partnership with Germany’s ECM label; in 1986 she and pianist Robert Levin issued the album Elegies. Kashkashian relocated to Germany in 1989, joining the faculty of the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg before moving to the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin so that her daughter could attend an American school. She came back to the United States in 2000 and has since taught at the New England Conservatory of Music.

She has performed at prominent American sites such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, yet she has remarked that Europe, where the viola enjoys full acceptance as a solo instrument, affords more frequent engagements than the U.S. Kashkashian regularly appears at festivals including Ravinia near Chicago, Marlboro in Vermont, and Verbier in Switzerland, and she frequently collaborates in concert with Levin. Contemporary works figure prominently in both her programs and her discs; composers who have written for her encompass Arvo Pärt, Peter Eötvös, and Krzysztof Penderecki, among numerous others. Her ECM catalog, highlighted by the 2013 release Kurtág and Ligeti: Works for Viola that earned a Grammy Award, remains especially celebrated. She has produced more than 40 recordings altogether, many on ECM’s New Series imprint, among them a 2021 album of Kurtág pieces recorded with the Parker Quartet.