Isabelle Faust
Isabelle Faust captivates her audience with her compelling interpretations. She approaches each piece with the utmost respect and sensitivity towards its musical historical context and the historic use of instruments. By combining greatest possible authenticity with a contemporary perspective, she continuously manages to create meaningful encounters with a wide variety of works for a diverse audience. After winning the renowned Leopold Mozart Competition and the Paganini Competition at a very young age, she soon gave regular performances with the world’s major orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonics, Boston Symphony Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Les Siècles and the Baroque Orchestra Freiburg. This led to close and sustained collaborations with conductors like Andris Nelsons, Giovanni Antonini, François-Xavier Roth, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Daniel Harding, Philippe Herreweghe, Jakub Hrusa, Klaus Mäkelä, Robin Ticciati oder Sir Simon Rattle. Isabelle Faust’s artistic curiosity encompasses all eras and forms of instrumental partnership. In addition to the great symphonic violin concertos, this includes Schubert’s Octet on period instruments, Igor Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” with Dominique Horwitz and György Kurtág’s “Kafka Fragments” with Anna Prohaska. Isabelle Faust has shown great commitment to contemporary music from an early stage: her most recent world premieres include compositions by Péter Eötvös, Brett Dean, Ondřej Adámek and Rune Glerup. In May 2026, she will première a new work for violin and orchestra by the Slovenian composer Vito Žuraj.
Highlights of the 2025/26 season include concerts with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, the Orchestre de Paris, the National Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony, the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden and the Munich Philharmonic, among others. She will be touring with WDR Symphony Orchestra, Les Siècles and the Balthasar-Neumann-Ensemble. This season she is Artist in Residence with the WDR Symphony Orchestra, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and the Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, where she can present the full range of her artistic work. She can not only be heard as a soloist – most notably as part of her own recital programmes – but also as a chamber musician, with her long-term collaborators Alexander Melnikov and Kristian Bezuidenhout. Another highlight is a programme based on Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, which she is set to peform on tour with Jean-Guihen Queyras, Jörg Widman and PierreLaurent Aimard. Numerous recordings have been unanimously praised by critics and awarded the Diapason d’or, the Grammophone Award, the Choc de l’année and other prizes. The most recent recordings include György Ligeti’s Violin concerto (with Les Siècles under the baton of François-Xavier Roth), Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto (with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra), works for violin and orchestra by Pietro Locatelli (with Il Giardino Armonico) and works for solo violin by Biber, Matteis, Pisendel, Vilsmayr and Guillemain. Isabelle Faust presented further popular recordings among others of the Sonatas and Partitas for violin solo by Johann Sebastian Bach as well as violin concertos by Ludwig van Beethoven and Alban Berg under the direction of Claudio Abbado.
