After a aseason of auditions, the Israel Philharmonic orchestra has chosen Nitzan Bartana as its next concertmaster, the first woman to occupy that post.
Bartana is presently second Konzertmeisterin at Basel Chamber Orchestra in Switzerland. She has also been a member of Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
The Israel Phil has three concertmasters to cope with a heavy domestic workload. It lost two of them in the past three years – David Radzynski to Cleveland (and on to Hamburg) and Dumitru Pocitari to the Wiener Symphoniker.
The veteran Ilya Konovalov has been holding the fort single-handed.
Bartana, 36, is a close contemporary of music director Lahav Shani.
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