Isabelle Faust

The violinist Isabelle Faust was born in 1972 in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and studied with Christoph Poppen and Denés Zsigmondy, among others. At the age of 15, she won the Leopold Mozart Competition and, in 1993, the Paganini Competition. She has since performed with such leading orchestras as the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Les Siècles, and the Freiburger Barockorchester. This developed into close collaborations with conductors including Giovanni Antonini, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Daniel Harding, Philippe Herreweghe, Jakub Hrůša, Klaus Mäkelä, Sir Simon Rattle, François-Xavier Roth, and Robin Ticciati. Isabelle Faust’s repertoire ranges from the early Baroque and Bach through the major violin concertos of the Classical and Romantic periods to contemporary music. Most recently, she premiered works by Peter Eötvös, Brett Dean, Ondřej Adámek, Rune Glerup, and, in May 2026, Vito Žuraj’s Violin Concerto Aphelion. She is particularly committed to approaching each work with an understanding of the context of its origins, studying original sources and historical performance practice, which she complements with her own contemporary perspective. Isabelle Faust, who plays a defining role in Lucerne’s Summer Festival as “artiste étoile” in 2015, was artist-in-residence in the 2025-26 season with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and the WDR Symphony Orchestra, as well as at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam. She also appeared with the Orchestre de Paris, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., the Dresden Staatskapelle, and the Munich Philharmonic. She maintained a close collaboration with Claudio Abbado, with whom she also recorded the violin concertos of Beethoven and Berg, receiving the Diapason d’or, the Echo Klassik, and the Gramophone Award. She is currently working on a recording of Mozart’s complete violin sonatas, the fourth volume of which was released in early 2026.

Lucerne Festival debut on 12 September 2009 in a Modern series concert with the Ensemble Contrechamps.

March 2026