Zakhar Bron

Zakhar Bron (Заха́р Ну́химович Брон ; born 17 December 1947) is a Russian violinist. He has been living in Western Europe since 1989.

Background
Bron was born in Oral, Kazakhstan to a Jewish family. His parents fled to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to escape the Nazis. His father was a Polish pianist and his mother was a Romanian engineering student. His first music teacher in his home town recognised his talent and advised him to attend, at the time one of the best violin schools in the USSR, the Stojlarski School for Music in Ukrainian Odessa. Bron lived in this time with a host family, and the pedagogue Arthus Sisserman taught him the basics. He afterwards moved with his father to Moscow where Boris Goldstein put him in his violin class at the Gnessin Conservatoire as well as taught him at home. In 1966 he became a student of Igor Oistrach at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. After Bron finished his master studies in 1971, he started doing his post-masters as well, though this was cut short by mandatory military service in the Red Army. In 1971 he was also a laureate (12th prize) at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. In 1977 he shared with the American Peter Zazofsky the 3rd prize at the International Henryk Wieniawski Violincompetition in Poland. Before he was well-known, he taught privately in Novosibirsk. Since then, he has taught at the Royal Academy of Music in London, the Conservatory of Rotterdam, the Lübeck Academy of Music and the Reina Sofía School of Music in Madrid. In 1997, he took up a position at the Cologne Musikhochschule.

Students
Bron's students have included Vadim Repin,  Maxim Vengerov,, Christoph Seybold,  Leia Zhu.

Controversy
Bron has attracted controversy because of accusations that violin competitions have unduly favoured his students with awards. In February 2018, Fabio Luisi resigned as chairman of the 2018 Paganini Competition, in protest at his perceived imposition of judges such as Bron by the Italian cultural official Elisa Serafini.