Isabelle Faust

The violinist Isabelle Faust was born in 1972 in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and studied with Christoph Poppen and Denés Zsigmondy, among others. At the age of 15, she won the Leopold Mozart Competition and, in 1993, the Paganini Competition. She has performed ever since with such major orchestras as the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. This has led to close collaborations with conductors including Giovanni Antonini, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Daniel Harding, Philippe Herreweghe, Jakub Hrůša, Klaus Mäkelä, and Sir Simon Rattle. Isabelle Faust’s repertoire ranges from the early Baroque and Bach to the great symphonic violin concertos and contemporary music. Most recently, she premiered works by Peter Eötvös, Brett Dean, Ondřej Adámek, and Rune Glerup. She is particularly keen to view each work in the context of its origin, studying original sources and taking into account historical performance practice, to which she adds her contemporary perspective. Isabelle Faust, who made a significant contribution to Lucerne Festival Summer as “artiste étoile” in 2015, was also recently artist-in-residence with the SWR Symphony Orchestra and at the Beethovenfest Bonn. Engagements in the 2024-25 season have included a tour of Europe and Japan with the ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, and she also performed with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the London and Boston Symphony Orchestras, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich. She worked closely with Claudio Abbado and also recorded accounts of the Beethoven and Berg violin concertos with him that received the Diapason d’or, the Echo Klassik, and the Gramophone Award. Her most recent CD, released in 2024, includes Britten’s Violin Concerto, which she recorded with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Jakub Hrůša.

Lucerne Festival debut on 12 September 2009 in a Modern series concert with the Ensemble Contrechamps.

March 2025