Anne-Sophie Mutter

Anne-Sophie Mutter is a German violinist, born in Rheinfelden in Baden in 1963. She studied with Erna Honigberger and then with Aida Stucki, both pupils of Carl Flesch. Herbert von Karajan heard her at the Lucerne Festival in 1976, when she was thirteen, and invited her to play with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival the following year; her first recording, of two Mozart concertos with Karajan, followed in 1978. Alongside the central concerto repertoire she has made new music a large part of her work. Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Henri Dutilleux, Sofia Gubaidulina, Wolfgang Rihm, André Previn and John Williams are among the composers who have written for her. She has won four Grammy Awards and received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2008, the year in which she set up the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation to support young string players.