Isabelle Faust

The violinist Isabelle Faust was born in Baden-Württemberg in 1972. She founded a string quartet at the age of eleven and won the Leopold Mozart Competition in 1987. With Christoph Poppen, she found a teacher for whom chamber music is also a central part of musical engagement. After winning the Paganini Competition in 1993, she went to France, intensively studied the works of Fauré and Debussy, and made her name with recordings of the sonatas of Bartók, Szymanowski, and Janáček. Isabelle Faust performs a repertoire ranging from the early Baroque and Bach to such contemporary composers as György Ligeti, Helmut Lachenmann, and Jörg Widmann. Her most recent premieres have been of works by Peter Eötvös, Brett Dean, Ondřej Adámek, and Rune Glerup. She especially focuses on approaching each work with a consideration of its genesis: by studying original sources and considering historical performance practice. Isabelle Faust, who made her mark on the 2015 Lucerne Festival Summer as “artiste étoile,” regularly performs with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Les Siècles, and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. She appears with such conductors as Giovanni Antonini, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Daniel Harding, Philippe Herreweghe, Klaus Mäkelä, Andris Nelsons, François-Xavier Roth, and Robin Ticciati. She worked closely with Claudio Abbado, with whom she also recorded the Beethoven and Berg violin concertos, for which she was awarded the Diapason d’or, the Echo Klassik, and the Gramophone Award. With her duo partner, the pianist Alexander Melnikov, she has recorded sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms; her latest recording, Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto with Les Siècles under François-Xavier Roth, was released in the spring of 2023. Isabelle Faust performs on the “Sleeping Beauty” Stradivarius from 1704.

Lucerne Festival debut on 12 September 2009 playing Michael Jarrell’s … Paysages avec Figures absentes … (Nachlese IV), with the Ensemble Contrechamps under Stefan Asbury.

July 2023