Violinist.
Florin Parvulescu was born in 1971 in Bucharest, Romania. He started playing the violin at the age of six at the Georges Enescu music school. In 1978, he attended the Juilliard School Pre-College division, studying with Shirley Givens.
By 1989, Florin Parvulescu went on to study at the Peabody Conservatory of Music where his principal teachers were Sylvia Rosenberg and Herbert Greenberg. He also worked closely with pianist Leon Fleisher and violinist Berl Senofsky.
In addition to earning Bachelors and Artist Diploma degrees at Peabody, Mr. Parvulescu was awarded numerous prizes, among them the Marbury Award and Yale Gordon award.
From 1996 to 1998 Florin Parvulescu was a member of the St. Louis Symphony. In 1998, he joined the San Francisco Symphony. He is currently serving as Artistic Director of Tateuchi Institute of Music, an annual festival and workshop in Mountain View, California, now in its fifth year.
As soloist and chamber musician Mr. Parvulescu has appeared in recital series at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Dame Myra Hess recital series in Chicago, Aspen Music Festival, Berkeley Chamber Music Series, Johanessen International School of the Arts in Victoria British Columbia, San Francisco Symphony Chamber Music Series, Chamber Music Series St. Louis, Heidelberg, Germany, and Fontainebleau, France, and as a soloist with the Xiamen Philharmonic in 2009 and 2010. He has performed in chamber music concerts with pianists Kiril Gerstein and Anton Nel, and performed Thomas Ades’s Piano Quintet with the composer at the piano.
Mr. Parvulescu has given masterclasses at the Beijing Conservatory and taught at the Singapore International Violin Festival in 2018 . He was featured on the McGraw Hill Young Artist Showcase on WQXR radio NY, National Public Radio, WFMT Chicago, and King FM in Seattle. The San Francisco Chronicle has praised him for his “gleaming tone and pyrotechnics.”
“Parvulescu...stepped into the breach admirably. His interpretive style is more fluid and lyrical, which made for an interesting contrast between the two. It also fell to him to accompany four soloists-a daunting assignment which he fulfilled with impressive aplomb.”
— The San Francisco Chronicle
Mr. Parvulescu studied conducting with David Zinman at the Aspen Music Festival and Michael Tilson-Thomas. As a conductor, he has led the New World Symphony, the Aspen Academy Orchestra, the Icicle Creek Festival Orchestra, the Academy Orchestra of San Francisco. In addition, he led performances of Stravinsky’s “a Soldier’s Tale” and works by Charles Ives and Scott Joplin with members of the San Francisco Symphony as part of the Symphony’s “ Keeping Score” project.
In August 2013, Mr. Parvulescu conducted the Macau Youth Orchestra in an all-Mozart program (Don Giovanni overture, Violin Concerto no.5 and Symphony no.40) for their US debut at Merkin Concert Hall in Lincoln Center, replacing the regularly scheduled conductor on one day notice. In the summer of 2013, he conducted performances of Russian classics Scheherazade and Polovetsian Dances as well as an evening of John Williams at “Music in the Mountains” Festival in Grass Valley California. In 2014, Mr. Parvulescu appeared with the Nanning Symphony in China in a program featuring Wagner’s Die Meistersinger Overture, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante and Mussorgsky- Ravel’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
In 2014, Mr. Parvulescu also conducted the premier of the concerto for violin&mandolin “ Tikkun” by Ariel Blumenthal written for Avi Avital, mandolin and Ittai Shapira, violin. During the 2015 Mid-Summer Mozart Festival in San Francisco, he stepped in for ailing conductor George Cleve conducting a varied program of arias from Don Giovanni, La Clemenza di Tito, as well as concertos for French horn and oboe. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote: ”Parvulescu...... stepped into the breach admirably. His interpretive style is more fluid and lyrical, which made for an interesting contrast between the two. It also fell to him to accompany four soloists-a daunting assignment which he fulfilled with impressive aplomb.”
