Dana Zemtsov

Dana Zemtsov is one of the most promising viola soloists of her generation. Gramophone Magazine has celebrated violist Dana Zemtsov’s playing as being “so perfectly tuned, so varied in color and with such considerable distances in the intervals between the notes, that you would be forgiven for thinking it sounded more like a chamber orchestra”. As a soloist, Dana has performed with symphony orchestras across the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, US, France, Brasil, Mexico, Ukraine, Estonia and the United Kingdom, under the baton of Leif Segerstam, Otto Tausk, Daniel Raiskin, Massimo Quarta, Marco Parisotto, Fabio Mechetti and Peter Manning. She has played chamber music with Janine Jansen, Giovanni Sollima, Martin Frost, Anna Fedorova, Ilya Gringolts, Boris Berezovsky, and many others. So far, she has released six critically acclaimed albums on the Channel Classics Records label with the likes of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and conductor Daniel Raiskin, Phion Orchestra and conductor Shizuo Z Kuwahara, and chamber music repertoire with pianist Anna Fedorova. Born into a family of musicians in 1992, Dana received her first music lessons from her grandmother and her parents. She continued her studies with viola virtuoso Michael Kugel.

In her own words, Dana tells us: “I was born in Mexico City, into an intensely musical family. Apart from a few violinists, a composer and one singer, the rest of my family members are all viola players. I like to think that part of the inspiration for me to pick up the viola was my grandmother Mila. She was a very free and bohemian spirit, a wonderful violist and so in love with music! Her dream was for the whole family to live in the same house in the countryside and to make music together all day long. That is the atmosphere that I want to keep alive, I bring that unconditional love for music to every single concert that I play.”