Throughout a distinguished career, Yossi Zivoni has been a highly respected performing artist and a dedicated and warmly regarded teacher of the violin. During his musical career Mr Zivoni has performed with many of the worlds leading orchestras under some of the most distinguished conductors in the world of classical music.
In both performance and recording, he has played a wide-ranging variety of music for the violin by great composers of the past such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms, and by modern masters like Bela Bartok and other distinguished composers, many of whom have composed works dedicated to him and which he has World premiered.
That such talent was bound to be recognised would not have come as a surprise to his distinguished colleagues or his many students, but how that talent first came to be recognised will be a surprise and delight, endowing it as it does with a humanity and warmth which allows us to be spectators at what was going to be a defining moment in a young boy’s life.
Yossi Zivoni was born in Tel Aviv of parents who were both Doctors, at a time of tremendous upheaval throughout the world. His was a typical middle class upbringing of the time, which taught him at an early age among other things, the wonder, and beauty of music. It was his own interest in music, which placed a young six-year-old Yossi Zivoni on the balcony of his home, playing the flute.
In one of those small but significant moments of serendipity, a lady passing below the balcony, heard Yossi playing. This lady, incredibly a violin teacher was so taken by the boy’s playing that she immediately knocked on the door and introducing herself as Mrs Rivka Minkova to Yossi’s parents, suggested that Yossi take violin lessons with her. With a quarter violin bought for him by his parents, Yossi embarked on a journey that would decide the course of his life. After only six months of tuition, Yossi Zivoni gave his first public performance in Tel Aviv.