The Moscow Soloists ensemble was founded by violist and conductor Yuri Bashmet in 1986. In 1992 the ensemble was completely revamped, taking in graduates and postgraduates of the Moscow Conservatoire. It made its debut on 19 May 1992 at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. Two days later it gave its first performance abroad, at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. 

The ensemble has given concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the Barbican Hall in London, the Tivoli in Copenhagen, the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Sydney Opera House, the Musikverein in Vienna, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome and the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire.

The ensemble takes part in the Proms concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Mstislav Rostropovich Festival in Evian, Sony Classical sponsored concerts at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées, Semaines musicales de Tours, Elba Isola Musicale d'Europa, December Nights, Prestige de la Musique at the Salle Pleyel, the World Chamber Orchestras Festival in Omsk and festivals in Ravenna, Montreux, Bath, Sydney, Qabala and Moscow. 

Since 2008 the ensemble takes part in the Sochi Winter Festival, of which Yuri Bashmet is Artistic Director. The Moscow Soloists take part in Bashmet’s Moscow International Viola Competition and his festivals in Yaroslavl, Khabarovsk, Rostov-on-Don, Minsk and the Seychelles. In January 2013 the ensemble appeared at a festival commemorating the maestro’s sixtieth birthday. 

The ensemble’s concerts are frequently broadcast and recorded by the world’s leading broadcasting companies, among them the BBC, Bayerische Rundfunk, Radio France and NHK. The orchestra has performed with Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich, Natalia Gutman, Viktor Tretyakov, Gidon Kremer, Maxim Vengerov, Vadim Repin, Sarah Chang, Shlomo Mintz, Barbara Hendricks, James Galway, Lynn Harrell, Mario Brunello, Thomas Quasthoff, Anna Netrebko, Olga Borodina, Jessye Norman and Yefim Bronfman. 

The repertoire of the Moscow Soloists includes over three hundred and fifty masterpieces of world classics and rarely performed works, ranging from Bach and Mozart to Schnittke and Denisov as well as music by Kancheli, Gubaidulina and other contemporary composers. 

In 2008 the Moscow Soloists received a Grammy award for its recording of music by Stravinsky and Prokofiev. In 1994, 2006 and 2009 the ensemble was a Grammy award nominee. 

In 2007, to mark fifteen years since it was founded, the ensemble undertook a tour of Russia, during which it gave forty-two concerts in thirty-nine towns and cities. In Ufa the musicians performed their one thousandth concert, while their concert in Severomorsk took place on the cruiser Peter the Great. The ensemble undertook an even larger tour to mark its twentieth anniversary, giving over eighty concerts in thirty countries. 

In the autumn of 2009 the Moscow Soloists undertook a tour of Russian towns and cities during which they performed on unique instruments crafted by Antonio Stradivari from the Russian State Collection of Prized Musical Instruments. In the 2013/14 season the ensemble’s musicians undertook a similar tour of Europe’s capital cities. 

In 2014 the ensemble took part in the cultural programme of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.

Yuri Bashmet is one of the most outstanding musicians of the present day. He studied music at the Moscow State Conservatoire under Vadim Borisovsky and Fyodor Druzhinin. Under the latter, Yuri Bashmet trained and held an assistantship at the Moscow Conservatoire (1976–1978). The start of his concert activities is connected with a tour to Germany by the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, founded by Rudolf Barshai (1976). Since 1978, Yuri Bashmet has taught at the Moscow Conservatoire, as a lecturer (1988), and later as a professor (1996). Starting in 1980, Yuri Bashmet has regularly given master classes in Japan, Europe, America and Hong Kong. His students, several of whom have gone on to become prize-winners at international competitions, perform with the world’s greatest orchestras.

In 1986 Yuri Bashmet formed the chamber orchestra Moscow Soloists. Later, several musicians took the decision to remain in France, while Yuri Bashmet abandoned leadership of the orchestra, which soon after ceased to exist. In 1992 Yuri Bashmet founded a new ensemble using the old name, its members the most talented young musicians of Russia, graduates and post-graduate students of the Moscow Conservatoire. 

In 1996 Yuri Bashmet established the Experimental Viola Faculty at the Moscow Conservatoire, where in addition to solo viola works the repertoire was expanded to include viola roles in chamber, opera and symphony music as well as a strong focus on the history of performing styles from the past and present. 

The geography of the musician’s appearances is vast: it includes the finest concert halls of Europe, the USA, Canada, South America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. For the first time in world performing practice, Yuri Bashmet gave solo viola concerts in such venues as Carnegie Hall (New York), the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), the Barbican Hall (London), Berliner Philharmoniker, La Scala (Milan), the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire and the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. 

His solo concerts and ensemble appearances with other outstanding performers never fail to pack halls and rouse lively interest. Musicians with whom Yuri Bashmet has performed include Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich, Isaac Stern, Gidon Kremer, Marta Argerich, Oleg Kagan, Natalia Gutman, Viktor Tretyakov, Rafael Kubelik, Seiji Ozawa, Valery Gergiev, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Colin Davis, John Eliot Gardiner, Yehudi Menuhin, Charles Dutoit, Neville Marriner, Paul Sacher, Michael Tilson Thomas, Kurt Masur, Bernard Haitink, Kent Nagano, Simon Rattle, Yuri Temirkanov and Nikolaus Harnoncourt to name but a few. 

Yuri Bashmet’s concert programs are unusually varied and include music from various styles and eras. Many contemporary composers have dedicated or specially written works for him. These include Schnittke’s concerto, Monologue and Concert for Three (dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich, Yuri Bashmet and Gidon Kremer), concerti by Gubaidulina, Аlexander Tchaikovsky, Balakauskas, Eshpai and Ruders, Golovin’s Sonata Breve, Raskatov’s viola sonata and Kancheli’s Liturgy and Styx. 

Yuri Bashmet is the founder and jury chair of Russia’s only International Viola Competition (Moscow) as well as president of the International Lionel Tertis Viola Competition in the United Kingdom. He is the recipient of various awards and regalia from Russia as well as from other nations. In 1995, he received the Sonnings Musikfond Prize, one of the most prestigious in the world, which was conferred in Copenhagen. Previous recipients of this award include Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern, Arthur Rubinstein, Dmitry Shostakovich, Mstislav Rostropovich, Sviatoslav Richter and Gidon Kremer.

Russian bass Nikolay Didenko graduated from the Moscow Academy of Choral Art in both singing and conducting. He was previously a soloist of the New Opera in Moscow and a member of the Houston Grand Opera Studio.

His operatic roles include Don Geronio (Il Turco in Italia) with the Royal Danish Opera, Shostakovich’s Rayokat the Liceu Barcelona, Cappelio (I Capuleti e I Montecchi) with Opera North (UK tour), Ramfis (Aida) and Oroveso (Norma) at the Teatro Comunale, Trieste (La Forza del Destino) and Comte des Grieux (Manon Lescaut) at Cologne Opera, La Sonnambula at the Bolshoi Theatre, Pistola (Falstaff) at the Bilbao Opera and Filippo II (Don Carlo) and Leporello (Don Giovanni) both with the Opera Köln. He continues to perform across the world with many significant companies including the Houston Grand Opera, New York City Opera, Metropolitan Opera and Bilbao Opera. He recently sung Don Pasquale at the Bolshoi Theatre and Iris at the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier. 

As a versatile performer, he is also established on the concert platform performing with Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Malmö Symphony Orchestra and London Symphony Orchestra to name a few. He performed in the world premiere of Green Mass by Raskatov with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski.

Engagements this season and beyond include his debut at Dallas Opera for King Dodon (The Golden Cockerel) and Turandot with Cologne Opera. On the concert platform, he reunites with Vladimir Jurowski for Frau ohne Schatten at the Enescu Festival, Bucharest, and performs Rachmaninov’s The Bells at the Gulbenkian Festival.

Nikolay features on the Grammy award-winning disc Penderecki conducts Penderecki, for Best Choral Performance (2017).