Anne-Sophie Mutter

Born in Rheinfelden in Baden, Germany, Anne-Sophie Mutter began her career in 1976, when she was 13, at the Lucerne International Music Festival, as Lucerne Festival was known at the time. Just one year later, she appeared in Salzburg with the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan. Since then she has given concerts in all the major music centers around the world, performing not only the classical repertoire but many new works as well. She has premiered 31 scores, including works by Sebastian Currier, Henri Dutilleux, Sofia Gubaidulina, Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki, André Previn, Wolfgang Rihm, Jörg Widmann, and John Williams; the latest of these is Thomas Adès’s Air, which she unveiled at the Lucerne Summer Festival in 2022. One of Mutter’s key priorities is to support the finest young musicians: for this purpose, she founded the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation in 2008 and the Mutter’s Virtuosi scholarship ensemble in 2011, with which she toured to Iceland, the U.S., and Canada in early 2023 as well as to several European cities in June. She also undertook a European tour in May with her longtime piano partner Lambert Orkis and cellist Maximilian Hornung, playing works by Brahms and Clara Schumann as well as Beethoven’s Ghost Trio and Sebastian Currier’s Ghost Trio. She will perform John Williams’s Second Violin Concerto in Australia and New Zealand in November. Anne-Sophie Mutter has received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the Leipzig Mendelssohn Prize, and the Polar Music Prize, as well as four Grammy Awards. She is a recipient of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the French Order of the Legion of Honor, the Bavarian Order of Merit, and the Grand Decoration of Honor of Austria. She was named an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013. Anne-Sophie Mutter has served as President of German Cancer Aid since 2021 and has been a member of the Lucerne Festival Foundation Board since 2022.

Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut on 23 August 1976 as part of the “Young Artists” series in a program of works by de Falla, Paganini, and Sarasate, with Christoph Mutter at the piano.

July 2023