Christian Tetzlaff

Christian Tetzlaff, who was born in Hamburg in 1966, completed his violin studies with Uwe-Martin Haiberg at the Lübeck Academy of Music; he spent the year 1985-86 in Cincinnati studying with Walter Levin, the primarius of the LaSalle Quartet. Since making his official concert debut with Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto at the 1988 Berlin Festival, Tetzlaff has worked with leading orchestras and conductors, including the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the major London and American orchestras. Tetzlaff has been artist-in-residence at New York’s Carnegie Hall and London’s Wigmore Hall and with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, and the hr Symphony Orchestra. In the 2022-23 season, he was featured by the London Symphony Orchestra as a “portrait artist.” Christian Tetzlaff performs a repertoire ranging from Bach to the present, including the world premieres of violin concertos by Harrison Birtwistle and Jörg Widmann. He also tackles such rarities as the long-forgotten Violin Concerto by Joseph Joachim. He is intensively committed to chamber music, not least with his Tetzlaff Quartet, which he founded in 1994. For many years he played in a trio formation with his sister, the cellist Tanja Tetzlaff, and the pianist Lars Vogt; the recording of the complete Schubert piano trios that the ensemble made before Vogt’s death in September 2022 appeared on CD in 2023. Tetzlaff’s recordings have won such prizes as the Diapason d’or, the Edison Award, and the Echo Klassik; his most recent release appeared in 2022 and is an account of the violin concertos of Johannes Brahms and Alban Berg, which he recorded with the DSO Berlin and Robin Ticciati. Christian Tetzlaff, who is on the faculty of the Kronberg Academy, plays a violin made by the German instrument maker Peter Greiner and modeled after a Guarneri del Gesù.

Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut on 2 September 1989, as part of the Young Artists series in works by Mozart, Webern, Prokofiev, and Beethoven.

July 2023