Kirill Maximov and Dumitru Pocitari have won the audition for the position of 1st Concertmaster of the Wiener Symphoniker. They will take up the position in the course of the coming year.

Kirill Maximov is currently 1st concertmaster of the Tonkünstler Orchestra.
He was born in Chișinău. At the age of five, he received his first violin lessons from Alla Guseva at the Sergei Rachmaninov Special Music School. From 2002 to 2003, he studied in Bordeaux with Robert Papavrami, and in 2017 he graduated with honors from the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna under the tutelage of Dora Schwarzberg. He has attended masterclasses with Koichiro Harada, Marianne Piketty, Taras Gabora, Lothar Strauß, Igor Ozim, Hubert Kroisamer, and Krzysztof Węgrzyn. Kirill Maximov is the prize winner of many international violin competitions, including the Mykola Lysenko Music Competition in Kiev, the Villa de Llanes Violin Competition in Spain, the Competition Young Virtuosos in Sofia, Bulgaria, the Stefanie Hohl Violin Competition, and the Fritz Kreisler Violin Competition in Vienna. Since May 2017, he has been the first concertmaster of the Tonkünstler Orchestra. 

Dumitru Pocitari is currently concertmaster of the Israel Philharmonic.
Born in 1991 in Moldova, Dumitru Pocitari started his music studies at the age of seven. Between 2000-2012, he won numerous prizes and medals at international violin competitions in Romania, Kazakhstan, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine, as well as second prize at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music Competition (2012). He has participated in master classes with Phillipe Bride, Bujor Prelipcean, Serban Lupu, Zakhar Bron, Julian Rachlin, Alexandra Soumm, Nikolaj Znaider and Pinchas Zukerman. Dumitru Pocitari has participated in international music festivals in Belarus and Moscow. A member of the Israel Philharmonic since 2014, he was appointed as Concertmaster in 2019.

Jan Nast, Artistic Director of the Wiener Symphoniker: "I am extremely happy that Kirill Maximov and Dumitru Pocitari were able to win the audition for the position of 1st Concertmaster. Thanks to their exceptional abilities and special artistic personalities, they will be able to make a valuable contribution to the further artistic development of our orchestra."