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![[Isabelle Faust]](/images/_images/_musicians/IsabelleFaust_AlvaroYanezx95.jpg)
Isabelle Faust
violin
Photo Credit: Alvaro Yanez
Violinist Isabelle Faust made her Boston Symphony Orchestra debut—her only previous appearances with the orchestra—in February 2008, as soloist in Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto for piano, violin, and thirteen wind instruments with James Levine conducting and Peter Serkin as solo pianist. Ms. Faust’s perspective on music continues to encompass and reflect upon her wide variety of ever-new experiences and discoveries. Having founded a string quartet when she was just eleven, her early chamber music experiences imbued in her a fundamental belief that performing is a give-and-take process in which listening is just as important as the expression of one’s own personality. When she was just fifteen, her victory at the 1987 Leopold Mozart Competition brought with it the prospect of a solo career; but the guiding principles instilled in her as a chamber musician remained strong. In Christoph Poppen, the longtime first violinist of the Cherubini Quartet, she found a teacher who shared and fostered her own musical convictions; whether performing sonatas or concertos, she constantly sought dialogue and the exchange of musical ideas. After winning the 1993 Paganini Competition Ms. Faust moved to France, where she grew to love the French repertoire, particularly Fauré and Debussy. Here she also came to international attention with her first recording—sonatas by Bartók, Szymanowski, and Janá?ek—and gradually refined her command of the most important works for violin. In 2003 she released her first recording of a major Romantic work for orchestra—the Dvorák Violin Concerto, which she had first performed at age fifteen under Yehudi Menuhin, and which remains a mainstay of her repertoire. In 2007 she released a critically acclaimed recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, a recording that reflects her awareness of period performance not as dogma, but as a challenge and incentive to reassess the substance of the music at hand in a way that enables convincing performance both with period ensembles such as Concerto Köln and with large symphony orchestras. Given her affinity for wide-ranging musical idioms, it is no surprise that Ms. Faust is also much in demand as a performer of contemporary music. The list of composers whose works she has premiered extends from Olivier Messiaen to Werner Egk and Jörg Widmann. She is a fervent proponent of music by György Ligeti, Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono, and Giacinto Scelsi, and also of such forgotten works as French composer André Jolivet’s violin concerto. In 2009 she will premiere works dedicated to her by composers Thomas Larcher and Michael Jarrell. In recent years, increasing numbers of orchestras and conductors have come to appreciate Ms. Faust’s artistry, leading to fruitful artistic partnerships with, among other, Claudio Abbado, Jirí Belohlávek, Daniel Harding, Heinz Holliger, Marek Janowski, Mariss Jansons, Sakari Oramo, the Munich Philharmonic, the Orchestre de Paris, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Orchestras, and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. She will make her Berlin Phlharmonic debut in 2009. Isabelle Faust performs on the 1704 “Sleeping Beauty” Stradivarius, on generous loan to her from Germany’s L-Bank Baden-Württemberg.
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