Zoltan Despond & Vesselin Stanev

Born in 1992, Swiss cellist Zoltán Despond trained with Pierre-Bernard Sudan in Freiburg, Marc Jaermann in Lausanne and Thomas Grossenbacher at the Hochschule der Künste in Zürich, where he obtained a soloist master's degree in 2018. At the Pavia Cello Academy he received tuition by Enrico Dindo and attended master classes with Antonio Meneses, Christophe Coin and Giovanni Sollima.

His concert tours have taken him throughout Europe, and he has performed with musicians such as Ilya Gringolts, Silvia Simionescu, Marko Milenković and Anahit Kurtikyan. Zoltán Despond devotes himself especially to chamber music, which he cultivates together with his regular piano partner Vesselin Stanev. He has received the Zubaloff Prize as well as honors from the Pierre and Renée Glasson Foundation and the Friedl Wald Foundation.

Pianist Vesselin Stanev hails from Varna in Bulgaria and trained at the Academy of Music in Sofia, with Dmitri Bashkirov at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, and with Alexis Weissenberg. Later he studied at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique in Paris and received the tutelage of Peter Feuchtwanger in London.

Vesselin Stanev is a prize winner in both the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and the Marguerite Long - Jacques Thibaud Competition. He regularly performs in major European concert halls such as the Wigmore Hall in London, the Philharmonie in Berlin, the Gewandhaus in Leipzig and the Salle Gaveau in Paris. Chamber music is central to his work, and he has recorded numerous CDs for RCA, Sony Classical and Gega New.