Sergei Stadler

Sergei Stadler

b. 1962 (Leningrad) · d. 2026 (Bucharest)

Sergei Stadler (full name Sergei Valentinovich Stadler; 20 May 1962 – 20 April 2026) was a Soviet and Russian violinist, conductor, and teacher. Born in Leningrad, he began studying music at the age of five. His mother, pianist and Saint Petersburg Conservatory accompanist Margarita Pankova, taught him piano, while his father, Valentin Stadler, a violist in the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, gave him his first violin lessons.

Stadler graduated from the Special Music School attached to the Leningrad Conservatory and then completed the Leningrad Conservatory course externally in three and a half years, owing to his intensive concert and touring schedule. He subsequently undertook postgraduate study at the Moscow Conservatory. His teachers included Boris Sergeyev, Mikhail Waiman, Boris Gutnikov, Leonid Kogan, and Viktor Tretyakov, and he also studied with David Oistrakh. After finishing his postgraduate studies, he began teaching violin at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.

In 1985, for the 300th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach, Stadler performed Bach's complete Sonatas and Partitas at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. He followed this with a Japanese tour featuring the Bach cycle and Niccolò Paganini's 24 Caprices. During this period, he gave between 130 and 150 concerts annually. In 1986 he received a German prize for the year's best criticism, and in 1987 he was among the first foreign soloists to tour China after a lengthy interruption, performing in Beijing and Shanghai.

In January 1988, Stadler first performed with an orchestra without a conductor at the Leningrad Philharmonic. The concert, held two days after the death of conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky, initiated a series of later projects in which Stadler led orchestras without a conductor. In the early 1990s, he performed all of Mozart's violin works with the Russian National Orchestra in Moscow and recorded Mozart's concertos in Saint Petersburg with the Honored Collective of Russia, the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra.

From 1995 until 2026, he gave annual New Year concerts at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow. From 1997, he took part in the Music in the Halls of the Hermitage concert series, performing in prominent rooms of the Winter Palace; several opera productions were also created for the Hermitage Theatre. He was artistic director of the International Music Festival in Perm for ten years from 1998, chief conductor of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory Theatre from 1998 to 2001, and later artistic director and chief conductor of the Saint Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, established in 2013.

As a conductor and soloist, Stadler appeared with major orchestras including the Russian National Orchestra, the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra, the orchestras of the Mariinsky and Bolshoi theatres, the London and Czech Philharmonic orchestras, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle, and the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. He also performed in leading venues such as the Musikverein in Vienna, La Scala in Milan, Royal Festival Hall in London, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. His collaborations included performances with his sister, pianist Yulia Stadler, notably a 2001 marathon presentation of Beethoven's ten violin sonatas in a single evening.

Stadler taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 2007, served as rector of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory from 2008 to 2011, and from 2018 led the violin instrumental-performance program at Saint Petersburg State University. He gave masterclasses internationally and was an honorary professor of the Beijing and Kyiv conservatories. His distinctions included first prize and a gold medal at the 1982 International Tchaikovsky Competition, the Lenin Komsomol Prize in 1984, the title People's Artist of the Russian Federation in 1999, and the Order of Merit in Culture and Art in 2024.

Stadler died in Bucharest on 20 April 2026 after becoming ill aboard a flight from Saint Petersburg to Istanbul that made an emergency landing there. He was buried at the Smolensk Orthodox Cemetery in Saint Petersburg.

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