David Hardy
David Hardy achieved international recognition in 1982 as the top American prize-winner at the Seventh International Tchaikovsky Cello Competition in Moscow. He won a special prize for the best performance of the Suite for Solo Cello by Victoria Yagling, commissioned for the competition. In praise of Mr. Hardy’s performance of the Dvorák Cello Concerto, TASS called it "beautifully spontaneous and unpretentious. His performance gave the feeling of improvisation through the varied use of his colorful and powerful sound.”
A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Mr. Hardy began his cello studies there at the age of 8. He was 16 when he made his debut with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. In 1979 he won a certificate in the prestigious Geneva International Cello Competition. The next year, he graduated from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Laurence Lesser, Stephen Kates and Bert Senofsky. In 1981 he was appointed to the National Symphony Orchestra as associate principal cello by its then music director, Mstislav Rostropovich, and was promoted in 1994 to principal cellist of the NSO by music director Leonard Slatkin. With Mstislav Rostropovich conducting, Mr. Hardy made his solo debut with the NSO in 1986, and collaborated more recently with Slatkin in Bernstein’s Three Meditations for Cello and Orchestra.
Mr. Hardy is a founding member of the Opus 3 Trio, now in its ninth year of residence at the Washington Conservatory of Music, and is the cellist of the 20th Century Consort, with whom he has premiered works by Stephen Albert, Nicholas Maw and Joseph Schwantner. He has performed solo recitals in the Washington area at the Library of Congress, the British Embassy, the Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts, the National Gallery of Art, the Phillips Collection, and the Dumbarton Avenue Concert Series. His playing can be heard on recordings under the Melodyia, Educo, RCA, London, Centaur and Delos labels. Mr. Hardy’s instruments were made my Carlo Testore in 1694 and Raymond Hardy in 1990.