Arts & Entertainment

Sonoma's Nigel Armstrong Takes Home Fourth in the Tchaikovsky Competition

The top-ranked American, Armstrong also won a special 3,000 prize for the best performance of the competition's commissioned work, John Corigliano's STOMP.

The results are in: violinist Nigel Armstrong, a Sonoma native, placed fourth in this year's International Tchaikovsky Competition, the highest rated American and one of the youngest contestants.

His top-finish ranking comes with an award of $7,250. In addition, Armstrong also won a special $3,000 prize for the best performance of the competition's commissioned work, John Corigliano’s STOMP.

“I'm truly honored and thankful to have made it into this level of the competition and thrilled to have been awarded the special prize for performance of John Corigliano's STOMP," said Armstrong, via a press release this morning.  

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Armstrong wow'd judges with a trick he says he learned "from the old-time fiddlers" at the Cloverdale Fiddle Contest: playing the violin behind his back. 

(You can still watch the dazzling - in the truest showmanship-sense of the word - performance in the archives of the competition's webcast.)

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The 21-year-old recently graduated from the Colborn Conservatory in Los Angeles, as a student of Robert Lipsett.  Nigel's first teacher was Leta Davis, whose students are known to this day as the "Little Fiddlers."

He came to international attention with his silver-medal wins in the 2010 Menuhin Competition’s Senior Division and the First International Violin Competition of Buenos Aires. In both competitions he received additional prizes, including the "Premio Tango" in Buenos Aires.

Since his solo debut with the Baroque Sinfonia, Mr. Armstrong has performed concerti and showpieces with the Boston Pops Orchestra, the Asociación de Profesores de la Orquesta Estable del Teatro Colón, the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, the Bozeman Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, the Reno Philharmonic Orchestra, the Downey Symphony Orchestra, and the American Philharmonic of Sonoma County, with which he performed during two seasons.

Held once every four years, the Tchaikovsky Competition is open to competitors between 16 and 30-years-old. Winners have included pianists Van Cliburn and Vladimir Ashkenazy, violinists Gidon Kremer and Vladimir Spivakov, cellists Nathaniel Rosen and Natalia Gutman, and singers Evgeny Nesterenko and Deborah Voigt.


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