In Wednesday’s (9/10) Charleston Daily Mail (Charleston, W.V.), Zack Harold writes about 36-year-old Anton Shelepov, “recently hired as the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra’s new concertmaster and the first violinist for its Montclaire String Quartet.… Shelepov … spent five years as the orchestra’s principal second violinist…. He was born in Irkutsk, one of the largest cities in Russia’s Siberian region … [Shelepov’s mother] poured her ambitions into her son. She gave him a violin when he was just four years old…. By the time he was 16, he was attending a music college in his hometown…. After graduation, his mother informed him he would be moving to St. Petersburg to continue his violin studies…. Masters programs in Russia usually take five years to complete. Shelepov finished his degree in four years, while also holding down a job as a full-time member of Moscow’s Chamber Orchestra Kremlin…. Shelepov eventually decided to leave the orchestra in June 2005 to pursue his Ph.D. at Michigan State,” before auditioning for the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra in 2009. For the new concertmaster position, Artistic Director Grant Cooper says he was “happy to see Shelepov emerge from behind the [audition] screen as the committee’s unanimous choice.”
Posted September 11, 2014
