Augustin Hadelich

Augustin Hadelich is “artiste étoile” at Lucerne Festival in the summer of 2026, where he is featured in a total of four concerts. Now a U.S. citizen, he was born in Italy in 1984 to German parents. He began playing the violin at the age of five, studying with Uto Ughi, Christoph Poppen, Igor Ozim, and Norbert Brainin, and was already performing internationally as a child. He later studied at the Istituto Mascagni in Livorno and, from 2004 to 2007, with Joel Smirnoff at the Juilliard School in New York. Hadelich won the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis in 2006; in 2009, he received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant in New York, and in 2011 he was awarded a fellowship by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust. Since then, he has performed with the leading American symphony orchestras as well as with major European ensembles. In the 2025-26 season, he was artist-in-residence with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and appeared with the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, the Chicago and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras, and the New York Philharmonic; in Europe, he performed with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Staatskapelle Dresden, and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra appointed him as its Artistic Partner. In late summer 2026, he tours Europe with the Berliner Philharmoniker, and in 2027 he will be the star soloist at that ensemble’s legendary Waldbühne concert. Hadelich has received numerous distinctions for his recordings, including a Grammy Award in 2016 for his recording of Dutilleux’s L’Arbre des songes and two Opus Klassik Awards: in 2021 for the album Bohemian Tales, which features Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, and in 2025 for American Road Trip, a tribute to his adopted home, devoted to works by American composers as well as to jazz and folk. He has taught at the Yale School of Music since 2021. Hadelich performs on a Guarneri del Gesù from 1744, formerly owned by the Polish violinist Henryk Szeryng.

Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut at the age of 12 on 20 August 1996 with the Festival Strings Lucerne in a violin concerto by Vivaldi.

April 2026