By Dr. Anthony LaMagra
Great Women Violinists Part II highlights some of the most gifted and talented female violinists who benefitted from the pioneering efforts of many of the women introduced in Part I. All born after WW II, they have expanded the opportunities for women musicians not only as soloists and recitalists, but also as members of symphony orchestras around the world, and as developers of young musicians through their teaching in music schools, colleges and universities. They have also varied the repertoire and created a variety of new venues for presenting concerts as a means of broadening audiences.
JULIA FISCHER, born in Munich, Germany, in 1983, exemplifies the breadth and depth of many 21st-century female musicians. She is a renowned classical violinist and pianist who performs 60 concerts per year while regularly teaching at the Munich University of Music and Performing Arts.
Fischer started playing the violin before her 4th birthday and a few months later began taking piano lessons from her mother. At age 9 she was admitted to the Munich University of Music. Her early career as a professional violinist was defined when, at age 12, she won the prestigious International Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition. One of the judges wrote, “Not only did she win outright in the junior category, but she was magnificently more inspired than anyone in the senior category.”
Julia Fischer has performed with many internationally acclaimed conductors and orchestras in most European countries, the US, Brazil and Japan. Her concerts have been broadcast on TV and Radio worldwide.
When she was 23 Fischer was appointed as a professor at the Frankfurt University of Music and was Germany’s youngest professor at the time. In 2011, she took over her former teacher’s chair at the Munich University of Music.
The recipient of many awards, in 2007 she was nominated Gramophone Classical Music Award Artist of the Year. Julia Fischer has often appeared as both piano and violin soloist on the same concert.
JANINE JANSEN, a Dutch violinist and violist, was born into a musical family in 1978. Her father was a distinguished church organist, her mother a classical singer, and her two brothers were professional musicians. Janine began violin studies at age 6, and at age 13, she competed in the Menuhin International Competition advancing to the Finals.
By 2001, Jansen’s career had flourished both as soloist with major orchestras and as a recitalist and recording artist. In 2005 Jansen was featured in the first of many performances at the famous Proms Concerts in London. After one concert at the Berlin Philharmonic’s outdoor venue, the Waldbuhne, she received a standing ovation from the enthusiastic audience of 25,000 people. A similar reaction occurred after her appearance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic before a sold out audience.
Janine Jansen is an avid advocate of chamber music and has performed and recorded with smaller string ensembles, often including her cellist brother and her father at the harpsichord. She created her own chamber music festival in Utrecht and has been a member of Spectrum Concerts Berlin since 1998. In addition to her solo appearances, Jansen has collaborated with numerous elite chamber musicians, such as cellist Mischa Maisky and Martha Argerich.
Janine Jansen’s repertoire ranges from Bach to Schoenberg and she has issued recordings of concertos by Bach, Beethoven, Britten and Prokofiev, as well as numerous sonatas and other solo violin literature.
Jansen has performed on several famous Stradivarius violins loaned to her by various institutions. In 2020, Janine was gifted the use of the 1715 Stradivarius named “Rode, Duke of Cambridge” courtesy of a European benefactor. In September of 2021, she starred in a documentary film about the legendary violin maker, Antonio Stradivari.
ARABELLA MIHO STEINBACHER was born in 1981 to a Japanese mother and German father. When she was three Arabella started violin lessons based on the Suzuki method and at age nine, was enrolled in the Munich College of Music and was taught by its top teacher, Ana Chumachenco. In later years Steinbacher took part in master classes at Juilliard with the legendary Dorothy DeLay and with Kurt Sussmannhaus in Aspen, Colorodo. Along the way, she won several important prizes including, the Joseph Joachim International Violin Competition, as well as a grant from the Free State of Bavaria in 2001. Shortly thereafter, Steinbacher became a student of the Anne-Sophie Mutter “Circle of Friends” where she polished her technical and interpretive skills.
Arabella Steinbacher frequently appears with world-class orchestras around the globe including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the London Symphony, the Chicago Symphony & the Cleveland Orchestra. Her concert tours have brought her to many countries in Europe and Asia, and she has collaborated with famed conductors including, Lorin Maazel, Christoph Dohnanyi, Zubin Mehta and Charles Dutoit. Her recordings are critically acclaimed and very much in demand.
Arabella is driven to use music as a means to uplift and support those in need. In 2011, she launched a tour of Japan in response to the tsunami disaster earlier that year.
SARAH CHANG is a Korean American violinist born in Philadelphia in 1980. Her mother, being a composer and her father a violinist and music teacher. Chang’s parents moved to the United States from South Korea in 1979 for her father’s advanced music degree from Temple University. Young Sarah was taught by her mother to play one finger melodies on the piano at age 3. For her 4th birthday, she was given a 1/16 sized violin. In 1986, when Sarah was 5 years old, she auditioned for and was accepted to the Juilliard School in NYC where she spent weekends studying. At age 6, Chang began violin lessons with Isaac Stern outside of school, and in 1989 she started working with the legendary teacher, Dorothy DeLay.
At age 9, Sarah Chang played as soloist with both the New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestras and became one of the most celebrated child prodigies. Following her High School Graduation, Sarah returned to Juilliard for university classes and continued lessons with Dorothy DeLay. During that time and into the mid 2000s, Chang made solo appearances with many of the world’s major orchestras. Her popularity was such that for the 2004 Olympics, she was selected to carry the Olympic Torch. Sarah Chang has toured with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and played in Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. She also held recital tours across Europe, North America and Asia. Chang has performed with every major orchestra in the world and has been soloist under the baton of the most revered conductors.
As a chamber musician, Sarah Chang has collaborated with Pinchas Zuckerman, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Martha Argerich, YoYo Ma and Isaac Stern.
Sarah has promoted and supported childhood music education for many years. Chang was appointed by President Obama to serve as a State Department Special Cultural Envoy and Cultural Ambassador for the United States. In that role, she was invited to play in North Korea with a South Korean Orchestra in 2002. Sarah Chang continues to be a much sought after soloist and recitalist throughout the world.
Hilary Hahn is an American violinist born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1979. A musically precocious child, Hahn began playing the violin one month before her 4th birthday in the Suzuki Program of Baltimore’s Peabody Institute. After one year, she studied in Baltimore with Klara Berkovich. In 1990, at age 10, she was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she studied with Jascha Brodsky for seven years. Hilary learned numerous etudes as well as Paganini’s Caprices, 28 violin concertos, chamber works and assorted showpieces. At 16 she completed the Curtis Institute’s university requirements but remained for several years to pursue elective courses until her graduation in May of 1999. During this time Hilary studied violin with Jaime Laredo and chamber music with Felix Galimir and Gary Graffman. She also spent four summers in the total-immersion language programs in German, French and Japanese at Middlebury College.
Hilary Hahn made her major orchestral debut with the Baltimore Symphony in 1991 followed soon after by debuts with the Philadelphia, Cleveland & Pittsburgh Orchestras. Her international debut was in 1994 with the Budapest Festival Orchestra. In 1996, she debuted at Carnegie Hall as a soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, playing Saint-Saens’s third violin concerto. Hahn began recording in 1996 – her albums often blend newer and traditional pieces.
She has soloed with most of the major symphony orchestras including those of Chicago, Boston, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles. And in 2007 she played in Vatican City with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Hahn has been interested in cross-genre collaboration and pushing musical boundaries. In 2005 she began touring with various singer/songwriters, often presenting songs that were completely improvised.
Since 2016, Hilary Hahn has piloted free concerts for parents with infants, a knitting circle, a community dance workshop, a yoga class and art students. She plans to continue these community-oriented concerts, encouraging people to combine live performances with their interests outside the concert hall and providing opportunities for parents to hear music with their infants who might be barred from traditional concerts.
NICOLA BENEDETTI is an Italian–Scottish violinist and festival director. She was born in 1987 in Scotland to an Italian father & an Italian-Scottish mother. She started to play the violin at age 4 and at 8, she became the concertmistress of the National Children’s Orchestra of Great Britain. By the age of nine, Nicola had already passed the eight grades of musical examinations while attending the independent Wellington School, and in 1997, began to study at the Yehudi Menuhin School for young musicians under Lord Menuhin and Natasha Boyarskaya in rural Surrey, England. At age 11 Benedetti played a solo concert in London’s Wigmore Hall, and made her Paris debut. In 2000, she competed in the Menuhin International Competition as a junior. Subsequent, very successful appearances at concerts throughout London and Scotland led to Nicola being granted the UK’s Brilliant Prodigy Competition Award. Nicola Benedetti left the Menuhin School at age 15 and began studying privately with the former concertmaster of the English Chamber Orchestra.
In the spring of 2003, invited as a soloist by the London Symphony, she participated in the recording of the DVD “Barbie of Swan Lake”. That recording led to the creation of a televised documentary on Benedetti, increasing public awareness of her talent and musical skills. In May of 2004, at age 16, Benedetti won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition, performing Karol Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto with the BBC Scottish Symphony. In 2020, Benedetti won the Grammy for Best Classical Instrumental Solo for Marsalis: Violin Concerto: Fiddle Dance Suite.
In September of 2012, Nicola Benedetti was honored to perform at “Last Night of the Proms” in London, playing Bruch’s First Violin Concerto. That same year she was lent the 1717 “Gabriel” Stradivarius by a board member of the London Symphony.
Benedetti has received numerous awards, including: honorary doctorates from Glasgow Caledonian University, the University of York and the University of Edinburgh. In 2019, Nicola Benedetti was made a Commander of the British Order of the Empire “For Service To Music”.
LISA BATIASHVILI is a prominent Georgian violinist active across Europe and the United States. She was born in 1979 in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, to a pianist mother and violinist father with whom she began violin lessons at age four. The family left Georgia in 1991 when she was 12, and settled in Germany. Shortly thereafter, Lisa enrolled in the Hochschule fur Musik und Theater in Hamburg. Mark Lubotsky, her teacher in Hamburg had been a student of the great David Oistrakh. Later, Lisa Batiashvili studied with Ana Chumachenco, the noted teacher of two other violinists we have heard today, Julia Fischer and Arabella Steinbacher. At age 16, Batiashvili placed second at the International Sibelius Competition in Helsinki.
From 1999-2001 Lisa was one of the first of the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists. During that time she performed extensively as a recitalist, concerto soloist and chamber musician. She made her BBC Proms debut in 2000.
Batiashvili has had a number of compositions dedicated to her and she and her oboist husband, Francois Leleux, have commissioned works from Georgian composers. They have been performed both in Europe & the United States. Lisa has been an artist-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic and with the Academia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome.
Her recordings are extensive and include a broad spectrum of both standard classics and newly commissioned works on the SONY label and has recorded several albums with Deutsche Grammophon, including a much acclaimed album of the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius Concertos, and an album of Prokofiev’s works including his violin concertos. Lisa plays a 1739 Guarneri del Gesu violin lent to her from the private collection of an anonymous German collector.