Gérard Poulet started as a child prodigy. His father, the violinist and conductor Gaston Poulet had the privilege of giving the first performance of Debussy’s Sonata in 1917, with the author at the piano. Gérard entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris at the age of eleven, and left the following year with a unanimously awarded first prize. Aged eighteen, he carried off the first prize at the Paganini Competition in Genoa.

Numerous concerts were to follow, and his career developed rapidly worldwide. Meanwhile, he continued to benefit from the teaching of such masters as Zino Francescatti, Yehudi Menuhin, Nathan Milstein and especially Henryk Szeryng, who considered him his “spiritual heir”.

Gérard Poulet now plays regularly, both in seasons and on international tours, with the finest orchestras, including the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre National de France, the National Orchestras of Strasbourg, Lille, Bordeaux, Lyon, the RAI Orchestra in Turin, the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège, the Beijing Symphony and the Stuttgart Kammerorchester.

Every year he takes part in the most prestigious musical seasons, including those of Radio France, the Musée d’Orsay and the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, and festivals such as Prades, Divonne, Sceaux, Besançon, Monte Carlo, Montreux and Carthage.

Gérard Poulet is also a special guest member on the juries of major international competitions.

As well as enjoying an international career which regularly takes him to Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, the United States, Canada, the Czech Republic, China, Korea, Brazil, Argentina and Africa, Gérard Poulet is also one of the foremost teachers of our time.

Besides giving master classes all over the world, Gérard Poulet also teaches at the Vienna and Beijing Conservatoires and at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. He was violin teacher for twenty-four years at the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique. In Japan in 2005, he was appointed teacher at the famed and esteemed Tokyo “Geidai”, where his class is reserved for the most talented pupils, destined exclusively for a solo career.

Gérard Poulet has made a great many recordings for various labels, as a soloist, with orchestras and in chamber groups. He has received several awards and prizes in France and elsewhere for works by Lalo, Bartok, Schubert, Franck, Lekeu, Pierné, Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky, to name but a few.

In 1996, following in the footsteps of the greatest violinists, he recorded JS Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin; the result was one of the most exceptional artistic and media successes of recent years.