Conductor and violinist Lev Markiz passed away on Tuesday. The Russian who fled to the Netherlands in 1981 and has lived here ever since, conducted at home and abroad. In the Netherlands he was best known as the founder and first conductor of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta string orchestra (then called Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam).
Born in Moscow in 1930, Markiz studied violin and chamber music, and later orchestral conducting. Markiz then played as concertmaster in the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, before founding his own ensemble Moscow Soloists in the 1960s. “In retrospect, you can say that this orchestra was the beginning of the end of my life in the Soviet Union,” Markiz said in an interview with NRC in 1983, in which he also told how the ensemble was increasingly restricted by the Soviet authorities. He was also discriminated against because of his Jewishness.
“The west is a true music paradise for me,” he said in that interview, shortly after his flight to the Netherlands. Within a few years he had already performed for several Dutch orchestras and in 1988 became the first conductor and artistic director of the newly founded Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam, where he remained for ten years. On Facebook the ensemble writes: “Under his leadership, the ensemble developed a unique string sound. In the time of glasnost and perestroika, he and Amsterdam Sinfonietta introduced a lot of music to the Netherlands by Russian composers such as Schnittke, Shostakovich, Gubaidulina and Denisov, composers with whom he had often collaborated in the Soviet Union.” Lev Markiz died at home in The Hague. He was 92 years old.