Victoria Mullova is a Soviet and British violinist. She was born on 27 November 1959 in Zhukovsky, Moscow Oblast, to Yuri Mullov, a researcher at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute. She graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, where she studied with Leonid Kogan.
Mullova won the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition in Finland in 1980 and the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1982. In 1988, she received the Accademia Chigiana Prize. She subsequently lived in several countries and has been based in London since the 1990s, building a major international career as a violin performer.
Her notable recordings include the violin concertos of Tchaikovsky and Sibelius, which received the Grand Prix du Disque; concertos by Brahms and Mozart, awarded ECHO Klassik prizes in 1995 and 2003 respectively; and Johann Sebastian Bach's partitas, nominated for a Grammy Award in 1995. Her recording of Beethoven and Brahms trios with André Previn and Heinrich Schiff received the Diapason d'Or in 1995. She has also recorded concertos by Bartók and Stravinsky with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen, as well as Beethoven and Mendelssohn concertos in historically informed performances with John Eliot Gardiner's Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.
In chamber music, her frequent partners have included pianists Piotr Anderszewski and Katia Labèque. Her 2000 album Through the Looking Glass, recorded with her husband, cellist Matthew Barley, and the ensemble Between the Notes, presented arrangements of music by George Harrison, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Alanis Morissette, the Beatles, Weather Report, and the Bee Gees. Mullova has described this project as requiring a different approach to sound and articulation from her classical training, with an expressive flexibility she compared in part to Baroque music.
Since 1999, Mullova has been married to Matthew Barley. Their daughter Nadia is a ballet dancer. Mullova's eldest of three children, jazz double bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado, is the son of conductor Claudio Abbado; her daughter Katia is the daughter of violinist Alan Brind.