“Born in Moscow into a family of musicians, Maria Milstein studied in Amsterdam with Ilya Grubert, in London with David Takeno and at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Waterloo (Belgium) with Augustin Dumay. Maria is a prizewinner of major international competitions as both soloist and chamber musician, among them the Città di Brescia and Premio Rodolfo Lipizer in Italy, the ARD Competition in Munich, the Lyon Chamber Music Competition and the Kersjes Prize in the Netherlands. In 2016 she was awarded the Fellowship of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, and in 2018 she received the Dutch Music Prize – the highest recognition for a classical musician in the Netherlands, awarded by the Ministry of Culture. Maria performs extensively across Europe in halls such as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, BOZAR in Brussels, the Vienna Musikverein, the Cologne Philharmonie and the Cité de la Musique in Paris. She has appeared as a soloist with orchestras including the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, the National Orchestra of Belgium, The Hague Philharmonic, the Brussels Philharmonic and Amsterdam Sinfonietta, and worked with conductors such as Vasily Petrenko, Giancarlo Guerrero, Michel Tabachnik, Jean- Jacques Kantorow, Christian Arming and Reinbert de Leeuw.
A keen chamber musician, Maria formed the successful Van Baerle Trio, one of the leading trios of its generation, with the pianist Hannes Minnaar and the cellist Gideon den Herder. After winning the ARD Competition and the Lyon Chamber Music Competition, the Trio was selected for the ECHO Rising Stars Tour in 2014, performing in famous concert halls all over Europe. The Trio has already released two CDs, both praised in the international press, and is currently recording Beethoven’s complete works for piano trio for Challenge Records.
Maria’s own debut CD ‘Sounds of War’, recorded with pianist Hanna Shybayeva for Cobra Records and featuring sonatas by Poulenc, Janáček and Prokofiev, received enthusiastic reviews in the international press and won the Edison Klassiek Prize 2015 in the category ‘best chamber music album’. Her second album ‘La Sonate de Vinteuil’, with the pianist Nathalia Milstein, was released on Mirare in October 2017, and was voted ‘best CD of 2017’ by the Dutch press.
Maria plays a violin by Michel Angelo Bergonzi , the ‘ex-Herman Krebbers’ (Cremona, c.1750), on loan from the Dutch Music Instruments Foundation, and holds a teaching position at the Amsterdam Conservatory Musical.
