Kian Soltani

In 2022/23, Soltani opens the season with numerous festival appearances, including BBC Proms, Bregenz Festival, Rheingau Music Festival, Vaduz Classic Festival, Tsinandali Festival and Kronberg Festival. He performs at other festivals throughout the year, including the Samobor Festival in Croatia and the Cello Biennale in Amsterdam. In between and following the festivals are his debut with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jader Bignamini, a tour with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, and his return to the Vienna Symphony and Festival Strings Lucerne in the spring.

Recent orchestral highlights include the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the WDR Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya. In July 2021, Soltani was artist-in-residence at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, where he curated, among other events, a Persian evening with the Shiraz Ensemble. In fall 2018, Soltani began a multi-year residency with the Junge Wilden at the Konzerthaus Dortmund. As a recitalist, Soltani has recently performed at Carnegie Hall, the Salzburg and Lucerne Festivals, Wigmore Hall, and Boulez Hall, where he was invited to curate an evening of cello music.

In 2017, Soltani signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon, and his first CD, Home, featuring works for cello and piano by Schubert, Schumann, and Reza Vali, was released in 2018 to international acclaim, with Gramophone calling the recording “sublime.” Since then, Soltani’s recordings have included the Dvorak and Tchaikovsky piano trios with Lahav Shani and Renaud Capucon, recorded live at the 2018 Aix Easter Festival and released by Warner Classics, and Dvořák’s Cello Concerto with the Staatskapelle Berlin and Daniel Barenboim in August 2020.

He was recently awarded the Innovative Listening Experience Award at the coveted Opus Klassic Awards 2022, Germany’s most prestigious classical music award honoring outstanding artists and recordings, for his album “Cello Unlimited,” released in October 2021. He worked with Deutsche Grammophon throughout 2020 on this latest CD, which is a celebration of cello and film music. Everything you will hear on this album has been made only and exclusively with my cello and played only by me,” Soltani said. The possibilities of this instrument are unlimited and infinite, and this album is a tribute to the instrument and also to epic film music.”

Soltani gained worldwide attention in April 2013 as the winner of the Paulo International Cello Competition in Helsinki. In February 2017, Soltani won the prestigious German Leonard Bernstein Award, and in December 2017, he was awarded the prestigious Credit Suisse Young Artist Award.Soltani was born in 1992 in Bregenz, Austria, to a family of Persian musicians. He began playing the cello at the age of four and was only twelve when he was accepted into Ivan Monighetti’s class at the Basel Music Academy. He was selected as a scholarship recipient of the Anne Sophie Mutter Foundation in 2014 and completed his further studies as a member of the Young Soloists Program at the German Kronberg Academy. He received further important musical training at the International Music Academy in Liechtenstein.

Kian Soltani plays the Antonio Stradivari cello “The London, ex Boccherini”, kindly provided to him by a generous sponsor through the Beares International Violin Society.