Dmitry Sitkovetsky (born September 27, 1954, in Baku) is a Soviet and American violinist and conductor. He was born into a Jewish family; his parents were violinist Julian Sitkovetsky and pianist Bella Davidovich. In 1966, while still at school, he won the first Concertino Prague youth competition.
He began studying at the Moscow Conservatory in 1972 and later graduated from the Juilliard School in New York, where he studied with Ivan Galamian. After arriving in the United States in 1977, he gave his first concert there two months later. In 1979, he won the Fritz Kreisler International Violin Competition in Vienna, and he became a United States citizen in 1983.
Sitkovetsky has performed widely in Europe and lived in Germany and the United Kingdom. He has led music festivals in Finland, Sweden, and Seattle, and has lived in London for more than 30 years. His repertoire includes all of Bach’s solo violin sonatas and partitas, all of Brahms’s violin sonatas, concertos by Mozart, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich, and works by contemporary composers. He has also performed and recorded with his mother, including Grieg’s violin sonatas.
From the mid-1990s, Sitkovetsky also worked as a conductor. He was chief conductor of the National Orchestra of Northern Ireland from 1996 to 2001 and principal guest conductor of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia named after Svetlanov from 2002 to 2005. He founded the New European Strings, a project-based orchestra, and made arrangements for string orchestra and ensembles, including Bach’s Goldberg Variations for violin, viola, and cello.
In June 2014, the Russian television channel Culture began broadcasting the first four episodes of his program, At Home with Dmitry Sitkovetsky, in which he introduced Russian viewers to prominent contemporary musicians.
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