Martin Riseley, Violin

Join us for a recital featuring Martin Riseley in our regular lunchtime series, performing music by Biber, Bach, Ysayë and Paganini.

Entry by koha. Masks kindly requested.

A native of New Zealand, Martin Riseley began violin studies at the age of six, and gave his first solo concert when he was ten. After several years of study with the English violinist Carl Pini, he entered the University of Canterbury School of Music as a pupil of Polish violinist Jan Tawroscewicz in 1986, with whom he performed in the Vivo String Quartet in 1987-88. The group received a special award from Lord Yehudi Menuhin at the 1988 Portsmouth String Quartet Competition, the same year that he won the Television New Zealand Young Musicians Competition and Australian Guarantee Corporation Young Achievers Award. Upon graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree he went to the Juilliard School in 1989 where he studied with Dorothy DeLay and Piotr Milewski. His other coaches there included Felix Galimir, Joel Smirnoff, Samuel Rhodes, Harvey Shapiro, and Paul Zukovsky. In 1991 he graduated from Juilliard with a Master of Music degree, and in 1996 with his Doctorate of Musical Arts degree.

Since becoming Head of Strings at the New Zealand School of Music he has premiered John Corigliano’s Red Violin Chaconne, and teamed up with Diedre Irons for regular recitals, including Chamber Music New Zealand. He has also made the first CD recordings of some important chamber works of Douglas Lilburn and ‘Meditations on Michelangelo’ by Jack Body on Naxos with the NZSO, which won the Vodafone Music Award for best classical CD in 2015. A premiere recording of violin works by David Farquhar was released on Rattle the same year. Since that year he has also been Concertmaster of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra: he has also conducted that orchestra, as well as the Edmonton Symphony, Manawatu Chamber Orchestra, Academy Strings of Alberta, and the NZSM Orchestra. His piano trio, the Te Koki Trio, with Jian Liu and Inbal Megiddo, has performed throughout New Zealand and in Sydney, Singapore and Malaysia. Its debut CD was a finalist in the Vodafone Music Awards for best classical CD in 2017.