In Russia I played the Count Yusupov Strad.
Now I play a Joseph Curtin.

In 1981 Ilya Kaler was awarded the Grand Prize at the Paganini Competition in Genoa. In 1985 he took the Gold Medal at the Sibelius in Helsinki. Then in 1986 he went home and won the Tchaikovsky.

“In Russia,” says Moscow-born Kaler, “I played the ‘ex-Count Yusupov’ Stradivari. It was the best sounding violin in the Russian State collection -- played for a time by Oistrakh and then Kogan. After the Paganini Competition, they gave me a couple of days to prepare two of the Caprices using Paganini's ‘Cannon’ -- a great violin, but not easy to play!”

“My principal teachers were Zinaida Gilels, Leonid Kogan, Viktor Tretyakov, and Abram Shtern, For sound, my inspiration goes back to Ysaye, Kreisler, and Elman. Where a player like Oistrakh used a lot of bow, I tend to draw the sound out with a slower bow. To do this I need a violin I can lean into with confidence. It has to respond immediately, and of course it must project.”

“In 1998 I asked Joseph Curtin to build me an instrument. A month after it was finished, I took it on tour, playing the Brahms Concerto. It has been my concert violin ever since. It has a rare versatility -- that combination of refinement and power that lets you sit down and play chamber music one evening, then stand up for a concerto the next.”

Along with a busy solo career, Kaler is currently a faculty member of the School of Music at DePaul University. His recordings of the Paganini Caprices (Naxos 8.550717) were deemed by the American Record Guide to be "in a class by themselves." In 2000, he used his Joseph Curtin violin to record the Brahms Sonatas with pianist Alexander Peskanov. The CD (Naxos 8.554828) won a 2002 Golden Ear Award from Absolute Sound Magazine”