Michal Kaznowski
Michal Kaznowski has been for the last twenty one years the cellist of the Maggini String Quartet. The Quartet are renowned for championing British repertoire, with worldwide sales of their recordings for Naxos’s Gramophone Award winning British Music series exceeding 130,000 discs. Their CD of Vaughan Williams won the Gramophone Chamber Music Award of the Year 2001 and other recordings of theirs have won numerous international awards. Last year they finished their acclaimed collaboration with the Master of the Queens Music SIr Peter Maxwell Davies – the premièring and recording of his ten string quartets.
Coming from a musical family, (his father was a professional cellist for a short while), Michal played immense amounts of chamber music at home with his brother Jan and with his sister Sheila on the piano. This culminated in a Beethoven Triple in Cambridge University in the early eighties.
Earlier in his career Michal Kaznowski was principal cello of many orchestras, including the CBSO for Sir Simon Rattle. His current teaching commitments include Junior Royal College of Music and Christ Church University, Canterbury. Previously he was the senior cello teacher at Birmingham Conservatoire and a staff cello teacher at the Purcell School. With the Maggini Quartet he teaches on numerous string quartet courses throughout the UK and Europe. Michal is also the conductor of the Youth Orchestra of the Pagoda, in Richmond, Surrey.