Bashmet moved to the Moscow Conservatoire in 1971, where he studied first with Vadim Borisovsky, violist of the Beethoven Quartet and later, Feodor Druzhinin.  It was only then that the idea of becoming a violist, as opposed to a guitarist, began to take firm shape. For the record, Bashmet last took up the guitar - rather "primitively" he remembers - at a broadcast concert a few years back where he also accompanied a jazz singer on the piano and, in the second half, conducted Mozart's Requiem!

Knuckling down to practise, Bashmet's studies inevitably led to competitions. The first major international competition was in Budapest in 1975, at which he (bizarrely) was only awarded second prize. That spurred him on to practise harder, and in 1976 all the effort paid off with his taking first prize at the Munich International Viola Competition, at which in the final concert he played Belá Bartók's Viola Concerto, conducted by Rafael Kubelik.

Returning home victorious, you might have thought all of Moscow's musical doors would have been flung open, but Bashmet found continuing resistance to the viola as a solo instrument, despite his efforts after Budapest to arrange as many concerts as possible. He comments, ironically:

I had already played in the Residenz in Munich, the Concertgebouw, the Musikverein, Tokyo's Suntory Hall, La Scala and Paris before I was able to play a recital in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. There was only one major hall that came after Moscow, and that was Carnegie Hall.

It is worth pointing out that in these 'western' venues, he was the first to play a solo viola recital.