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Plamena Nikitassova & Les Élémens
Biography Plamena Nikitassova & Les Élémens
Plamena Nikitassova
In addition to her active concert career as a soloist and chamber musician, Plamena Nikitassova served as concertmaster of the Johann Sebastian Bach Foundation in St. Gallen from 2013 to 2017. From 2018 onwards, she has been regularly invited to lead various ensembles in France and Germany, including the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. In 2020, Nikitassova founded the chamber music series "Im Wandel der Zeit" (The Changing Times) in Basel; the series aims to present well-known and lesser-known compositions from the 18th and 19th centuries within their original stylistic and aesthetic contexts, using instruments with historical specifications and focusing on the specific playing techniques associated with Romantic-era string instruments.
Born in Varna, Bulgaria, Plamena Nikitassova began playing the violin at the age of five; at sixteen, she received a scholarship that took her to Switzerland for her musical studies. She studied classical violin at the Geneva Conservatory and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. She obtained her soloist diploma in Geneva in 1999—graduating with distinction and the "Premier Prix de Virtuosité" under Prof. M. Karafilova—and was awarded the Leenhards Foundation Prize in Lausanne that same year. After meeting the violinist Jaap Schröder (Amsterdam), Nikitassova turned her attention to early music, completing her studies in Renaissance and Baroque violin with Chiara Banchini at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in 2005.
She has received high praise from the international press for her CD recordings—*Violin Sonatas by C. Zuccari* (2012, Diapason d’Or Découverte), *Violin Sonatas by Gaspard Fritz 1747* (2014), *The Violin’s Delight – a garden of pleasure* (2017, Diapason 5), as well as *Beethoven, Debussy and Ravel* (2016), *Mozart and His Contemporaries* (2018), and *Johann Sebastian Bach Sonatas* (2021). Her partners for these recordings included Jörg-Andreas Bötticher on harpsichord, and Rudolf Lutz and Aline Zylberajch on piano. Her research findings regarding a forgotten historical violin technique—the so-called "low position" (holding the instrument against the chest)—are reflected in two further recordings: Johann Paul von Westhoff’s *Suites for Solo Violin* (2020) and Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s *Sonatae Violino Solo 1681* (2022). Both recordings were included in the "Best of List" for Early Music by the German Record Critics' Award (April 2022); the former was also awarded the *Diapason d’Or*, while the latter received a *Diapason 5* rating.
