Salvatore Accardo

Salvatore Accardo (born September 26, 1941) is an Italian violin virtuoso and conductor. He is highly regarded for his interpretations of Paganini, J. S. Bach, contemporary works, chamber music, and opera conducting. Accardo was born in northern Italy and studied violin in the southern Italian city of Naples in the 1950s. He gave his first professional recital at the age of 13 performing Paganini's Capricci. In 1956 Accardo won the Geneva Competition and in 1958 became the first prize winner of the Paganini Competition in Genoa. He has recorded Paganini's famous 24 Caprices (re-recorded in 1999) for solo violin and was the first to record all six of the Paganini Violin Concertos. Accardo has an extensive discography of almost 50 recordings on Philips, DG, EMI, Sony Classical, Foné, Dynamic, and Warner-Fonit. Accardo founded the Accardo Quartet in 1992 and he was one of the founders of the Walter Stauffer Academy in 1986. He founded the Settimane Musicali Internazionali in Naples and the Cremona String Festival in 1971, and in 1996, he re-founded the Orchestra da Camera Italiana (O.C.I.), whose members are the best pupils of the Walter Stauffer Academy. Accardo owns two Stradivarius violins, the "Hart ex Francescatti" (1727) and the "Firebird ex Saint-Exupéry" (1718). Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.