Alexander Rybak country of citizenship Norway
Early life
Rybak was born in Minsk, Belarus, which at that time was the Byelorussian SSR in the Soviet Union. His parents and most of his other family hail from the town Vitebsk, in Northern Belarus. His father Igor Rybak, a well-known classical violinist who performed alongside Pinchas Zukerman, defected to Norway in 1991 after a concert tour of a Belarusian chamber orchestra which he was part of. Rybak's father lived with a musical family who gave him shelter and food in exchange for violin lessons for their son. Alexander Rybak and his mother Natalia Rybak (née Gurina), who worked as a music journalist and a piano teacher, arrived in Norway on a tourist visa and were initially refused a residence permit. Eventually, the Rybak family settled in Nesodden in the early 1990s. Rybak and his family received Norwegian citizenship after seven years of residing in Norway.At the age of five, Rybak began to play piano but eventually picked up the violin as his main instrument. He stated "I always liked to entertain and somehow that is my vocation". He became a student at the Barratt Due Institute of Music in Oslo at the age of 10. As a result of his Eurovision win in 2009, he took a break from his bachelor's degree studies at the institute, but in 2011 he returned to his studies, and in June 2012 he graduated from the institute with a Bachelor of Music in violin performance.
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