Aitzol Iturriagagoitia & Enrique Bagaría
Biography Aitzol Iturriagagoitia & Enrique Bagaría
Enrique Bagaría
Winner of the María Canals International Piano Competition (Barcelona, 2006), Enrique Bagaría was born in Barcelona in 1978 and graduated in piano from the city’s Conservatorio Municipal. During his undergraduate years he also spent some time at the École Normale Alfred Cortot in Paris. He went on to postgraduate studies at Barcelona’s Conservatorio Superior de Música del Liceu, under the supervision of Stanislav Pochekin, and then at Madrid’s Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía, where he worked with Dmitry Bashkirov, Claudio Martínez Mehner and Galina Eguiazarova. He completed his training with Vadim Sukhanov at the Richard Strauss Conservatory in Munich. He also attended masterclasses given by such eminent pianists as Alicia de Larrocha, Josep María Colom, Eliso Virsaladze, Andrzej Jasinski, Ralf Gothóni, Vitaly Margulis, André Watts and Boris Petrushansky.
In recent seasons he has performed at many of the world’s major venues and festivals, including Barcelona’s Palau de la Música Catalana and L’Auditori, Madrid’s Auditorio Nacional and Teatro de la Zarzuela, the Auditorio de Zaragoza, Centro Cultural Miguel Delibes in Valladolid, Palacio Euskalduna in Bilbao and Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville; Barcelona’s Ibercamera concerts, the Santander International Festival, Granada’s Festival of Music and Dance and the Festival Castell in Peralada; the St Petersburg Philharmonia, National Philharmonic of Ukraine (Kiev), Salle Cortot (Paris), Teatro Dal Verme (Milan), Academia de España (Rome), Luis Ángel Arango Concert Hall (Bo- gotá), Oriental Art Center (Shanghai) and National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing), as well as appearing in various concert series in cities such as New York, Chicago, Brussels and Munich.
Enrique Bagaría has also appeared as soloist with the Mariinsky Orchestra, Wiener Kammer-Orchester, Salzburger Kammerphilharmonie, Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá and most of the Spanish symphony orchestras, including the Sinfónica de Galicia, Orquesta de Valencia, Castilla y León and Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya (OBC), under the baton of such distinguished conductors as Valery Gergiev, Vasily Petrenko, Yoon Kuk Lee, Francisco Rettig, Pedro Halffter, Eduardo Portal, Salvador Brotons and Manuel Galduf, among others.
A keen chamber musician, he regularly collaborates with musicians from the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, including Lucas Macías Navarro, Guilhaume Santana, Vicent Alberola and José Vicente Castelló. Other chamber music partners include the Elias String Quartet, Cuarteto Quiroga, Stefano Canuti, Erez Ofer, Alexandre da Costa and Latica Honda-Rosenberg, Josep Colomé, Alejandro Bustamante and Pau Codina.
Enrique currently teaches at the Conservatorio Superior de Música del Liceu in Barcelona.
Aitzol Iturriagagoitia
was born in Éibar in the Spanish Basque Country in 1975. He studied with Zakhar Bron at the Reina Sofía School of Music in Madrid, and with Kolja Lessing, Ingolf Turban and Hatto Beyerle at the conservatories of Leipzig, Stuttgart and Hannover respectively.
A prize-winner in the Henryk Wieniawski (Lublin) and European Broadcasting Union com- petitions, he has performed as soloist with the Orquesta Nacional de la República Dominicana, Vogtland Philarmonie, Mittelsächsischen Philharmonie, Joven Orquesta de Euskadi, Orquesta Sinfónica de Bilbao, Orquesta Sinfónica de Euskadi and Orquesta de Cámara Reina Sofía, with such eminent conductors as Yehudi Menuhin and Lorin Maazel.
He has collaborated with some of the world’s leading musicians, including Christian Zacharias, Gidon Kremer, Heinz Holliger, José Luis Estellés, Asier Polo, Gerald Fauth, Frithjof-Martin Grabner, Vladimir Mendelssohn, Jean-François Heisser, Mariana Sîrbu, Marie-Elisabeth Hecker, Edicson Ruiz, Giovanni Bellucci, Kolja Lessing, Andoni Mercero, Marta Zabaleta, Mate Bekavac, Martin Spangenberg, Christian Pohl, David Apellániz, Luis Fernando Pérez and Enrique Bagaría.
As chamber musician he was first violin with the Cuarteto Iturriaga and, later, the Cuarteto Arriaga, and has been invited to perform at the most prestigious venues and festivals in Europe, including London’s Wigmore Hall, the Berlin Konzerthaus, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Palau de la Música de Barcelona and Palacio Real in Madrid (playing one of the palace’s famed Stradivarius instruments), and the MDR-Musiksommer, Kuhmo Chamber Music, San Sebastián Musical Fortnight and Lockenhaus festivals.
He also has wide-ranging experience in contemporary music and has worked with Abel Ehrlich, Jacqueline Fontaine, Krzysztof Meyer, Heinz Holliger, Salvatore Sciarrino, Francisco Lara and Aristides Strongylis, among other composers, as well as playing with international groups such as Ensemble Modern (Frankfurt), Ensemble Avantgarde (Leipzig) and the Isang Yun Ensemble Berlin.
In a long and productive recording career he has made recordings for German radio stations including MDR, BR, SWR and NDR, as well as for Radio Nacional and other Spanish radio stations. Aitzol Iturriagagoitia has taught at some of Europe’s most prestigious music schools. He has given masterclasses in Asia and Latin America as well as in Spain, and he currently divides his time between his performing and teaching violin at the Musikene conservatory (San Sebastián).
