My beloved Violin. Part 1

Nelli Shkolnikova (8 July 1928 – 2 February 2010) was a Russian classical violinist who spent many years teaching in Australia and the United States. She played her first concerto at age eight. In 1953, when she was 25 years old, she was the first woman to win a prestigious Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition in Paris . In 1982 she defected to the West in Berlin and settled in Melbourne, where she taught at the Victorian College of the Arts . In 1987, on the recommendation of Isaac Stern, she was invited to join the faculty of Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music as professor of violin. She later returned to her post at the VCA in Melbourne. We spoke with her in July 2008 and recorded a program dedicated to her 80th Birthday. In the first part Nelli speaks of her childhood in Moscow three. She remembers how at the age of five she entered the Moscow Conservatory, where she studied with Yuri Yankelevich. Nelli Shkolnikova died in Melbourne, following a long battle with cancer, on 2 February 2010

Young Nelli Shkolnikova Source: Supplied

Paris 1953 Nelli Shkolnikova and Jacques Thibaud Source: Supplied

Source: SBS