After graduating from the Central Music School for Especially Gifted Children in Moscow, where he studied with Zinaida Gilels, Ilya Kaler continued working under the guidance of Leonid Kogan and Viktor Tretyakov at the Moscow State Conservatory and later with Abram Shtern in Kiev and Los Angeles.

Recitals and solo engagements with orchestras have taken him to Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas. His appearances as a soloist with orchestras include collaboration with, among others, the St Petersburg Philharmonic, Zurich Chamber Orchestra, Montreal Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Seattle Symphony, New Japan Philharmonic and the Osaka Century Orchestra. He has worked with a number of outstanding conductors, including Valery Gergiev, Dmitry Kitaenko, Mariss Jansons and Jerzy Semkow.

Ilya Kaler has served as a concertmaster of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra as well as a guest concertmaster with Aspen Music Festival, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestras. He has been a Professor of Violin at the Eastman School of Music and at the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, and is currently a Professor of Violin at DePaul University School of Music in Chicago.

An active chamber musician, he has performed at festivals and chamber music societies around the world with Yuri Bashmet, Emmanuel Ax, Janos Starker, Tsuyoshi Tutsumi, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Vadim Repin, Cécile Licad, Gérard Causse, Myron Bloom, Eli Eban, Atar Arad, Steven Doane, Alexander Peskanov, Boris Slutsky and others.

Ilya Kaler records exclusively for Naxos Records. The recordings released in the last ten years include works by Ysaÿe, Brahms, Schumann, Shostakovich, Glazunov, Dvořák, Paganini, Tchaikovsky, Bach, Taneyev and Szymanowski.

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