Isabelle Faust

Isabelle Faust, born in Esslingen am Neckar in 1972, is a German violinist. She had her first lessons at five and later studied with Christoph Poppen and Dénes Zsigmondy. She won the Leopold Mozart Competition in Augsburg in 1987 and the Paganini Competition in Genoa in 1993, then spent nine years in Paris, where she made her first recording, of music by Bartók. Her repertoire is unusually broad. She plays Bach and Mozart, at times on Baroque-style instruments and bows, as readily as the concertos of Brahms and Berg or the music of Ligeti and Kurtág, and she has given the first performances of works by composers including Jörg Widmann and Péter Eötvös. The pianist Alexander Melnikov is her regular recital partner, and her many recordings for Harmonia Mundi have been widely honoured. She has been a professor of violin at the Berlin University of the Arts since 2004 and plays the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ Stradivarius of 1704.