"Her playing is captivating with its emotion and intensity as well as, again and again, with pure tonal beauty"

                Fono Forum

“Steinbacher’s was the kind of performance which had her audience hanging on her every note. She played like someone with the most urgent of messages to communicate and all the skills necessary for that communication. She was as happy to take her listeners by the scruff of the neck as to woo them with heart-melting tenderness.”

                Irish Times

Young, German violinist Arabella Steinbacher joins us for Hartmann’s notoriously difficult and rarely performed Concerto Funebre as well as Mozart’ Rondo in C major and Adagio in E major. Hartmann’s concerto was written at the beginning of WWII and was inspired by his feelings about the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia. Composers’ early and late works appropriately begin and end our program: Strauss’ Serenade in E-flat major, which he wrote at the tender age of eighteen, opens the concert and Haydn’s final symphony— Symphony No. 104 “London” – will bring the program to a richly melodic conclusion.

Since her extraordinary and unexpected debut in Paris in March 2004, when she stepped in on short notice for an ailing colleague and performed the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under Sir Neville Marriner, German violinist Arabella Steinbacher has become a fast-rising star on the international concert scene.

Arabella Steinbacher’s diverse repertoire includes more than twenty concertos for violin. In addition to all of the major concertos of the Classical and Romantic period, she also performs those of Barber, Berg, Glazunov, Khatchaturian, Milhaud, Prokofiev, Schnittke, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Szymanowski, and Hartmann.

Arabella Steinbacher has already appeared with leading international orchestras including the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre, The London Philharmonic, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the New Japan Philharmonic, and more. An important part of her concert calendar is also devoted to chamber music. Recitals and trio concerts are scheduled for cities all over the world, as well as at international music festivals including the Munich Summer Festival, Schleswig-Holstein-Festival, the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the Salzburg Festival, and the Schwetzinger Festival.

Born in Munich in 1981 to a German father and a Japanese mother, Arabella Steinbacher began studying the violin at the age of three. Her mother is a professionally trained singer who came to Germany from Japan to study music, and her father was the first Solorepetitor in the Bayerische Staatsoper, from 1960 to 1972.

At nine, she became the youngest violin student of Ana Chumachenko at the Munich Academy of Music. She received further musical inspiration and guidance from Ivry Gitlis, whom she still meets regularly in Paris. In 2001, she won the sponsorship prize of the Free State of Bavaria and in the same year she was awarded a scholarship by the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation. From Anne-Sophie Mutter, who personally supports her, Ms. Steinbacher received a bow from the master luthier Benoit Rolland.  Arabella Steinbacher plays the “Booth” Stradivari (1716) generously provided by the Nippon Music Foundation. She also plays the "Jarnovich" Guarneri Del Gesu (1741) kindly loaned by Jonathan Moulds.

Purchase Arabella Steinbacher's Dvorak & Szymanowski recording