- Period: Modern (1910-1949)
- Born: 1961
Biography
Norwegian Truls Mørk (b. 1961) is one of the world's leading cellists, particularly noted for his romantic, emotional approach. His parents were professional musicians; his father was a cellist, and his mother a pianist. His mother started him on piano lessons at the age of seven, but she soon abandoned the idea when young Truls did not show sufficient progress. Shortly thereafter, John Mørk decided to start his son on violin lessons with the violinist from his own quartet, but their touring career kept him away from teaching for long stretches of time. As a result, John decided to teach Truls his own instrument, the cello.Truls liked the instrument because of its larger size, and insisted on starting his studies with the Bach Cello Suite No. 1 and the Brahms e minor Cello Sonata. "This turned out to be much more difficult than I thought it would be," he says, but he kept working at it. He says his father did not push him for fear that he would practice too much and become a musician.
At the age of seventeen, Truls began studying with Frans Helmerson. Later he studied with Austrian cellist Heinrich Schiff, then in Moscow with Natalia Shakhovskaya, a pupil of Mstislav Rostropovich, whom Mørk had admired for his broad range of color and his flexible, melodic use of vibrato. Mork dislikes the German style of "even" vibrato, which, he says, drains the music of its vitality.
In 1982 at the age of twenty-one, Mørk became the first Scandinavian to win the International Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition. He also won the Naumberg Competition in New York in 1986, the Cassado Cello Competition in Florence in 1983, and the UNESCO Prize at the European Radio-Union Competition in Bratislava.
His international touring career commenced in 1989 when he was selected to travel with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra under Mariss Jansons on their 1994 North American tour. The tour took Mørk to many major venues, including Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Symphony Hall in Boston, and Orchestra Hall in Chicago. He has appeared as a soloist with other ensembles including the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony, the Moscow Philharmonic, The St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra of Rome, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Orchestre de Paris, while collaborating with many of the world's leading conductors, including Vladimir Ashkenazy, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Neeme Jarvi, and Witold Lutoslawski.
Mørk is an active chamber musician, and appears frequently in festivals throughout the world. He is the founder and Artistic Director of the International Chamber Music Festival in Stavanger. Mørk plays a rare 1723 Domenico Montagnana cello purchased for him by the SR Bank.
He has recorded for Lyrinx and Simax, made a number of records for Bis, and is an exclusive artist on the Virgin Records label. He is a winner of the Diapason d'Or, Le Choc, and Gramophone Awards, and was nominated for a Grammy Award for his recording of the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No 1. ~ Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide
