The violist Yulia Deyneka has been one of the builders of Daniel Barenboim's pioneering West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which has united Arab and Israeli musicians. She supervised the orchestra's viola section for some years and has gone on to a position as a tenured professor at the orchestra's associated Barenboim-Said Academy in Spain. But she has also built a strong solo career in ensembles in several countries unconnected with Barenboim. Deyneka was born in 1982 on Sakhalin Island off Russia's Pacific coast. She grew up in Moscow and attended the Central Music School of the Moscow Conservatory, studying with Maria Sitkovskaya, and then the Conservatory itself, under Alexander Bobrovsky. Deyneka moved to Germany for further study, graduating from programs at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Rostock and the University of the Arts in Berlin, studying with Felix Schwarz and Wilfried Strehle, respectively. With scholarship support from the Vladimir Spivakov International Charity Foundation, she toured widely in Europe and Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Although the bulk of her career has been centered on western Europe, Deyneka maintained her connections with her native country, winning the country's Presidential Prize in 1997. The year 2005 represented a breakthrough for her in multiple respects: she was recruited for by Barenboim for the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and she won a competition for the position of principal viola with the Berlin Staatskapelle, one of Germany's most venerable ensembles. She has often appeared as a soloist with the Staatskapelle and other groups, and in 2010, under conductor Andris Nelsons, she gave the premiere of Alfred Schnittke's viola concerto. Deyneka added two more prestigious positions to her CV in the mid-2010s: she became a member of the new String Quartet of the Berlin Staatskapelle, which gave its inaugural concerts in 2017, and she joined the Boulez Ensemble, which took up a residence at Berlin's new Pierre Boulez Hall. Deyneka had already amassed a strong record as a chamber musician, performing with Barenboim and others; she joined Barenboim, his violinist son Michael Barenboim, and fellow West-Eastern Divan Orchestra member Kian Soltani on cello for a 2018 release of piano quartets by Mozart, released on the Deutsche Grammophon label. ~ James Manheim