After winning the prestigious Leopold Mozart and Paganini competitions at an early age, Isabelle Faust was soon invited to appear with the world’s leading orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo.
She performs repertoire ranging from the works of J.S. Bach to contemporary composers such as Ligeti, Lachenmann, and Widmann, and is equally at home as a chamber musician or as a soloist with major orchestras or period ensembles. Over the course of her career she has had the opportunity regularly to perform or record with such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Frans Brüggen, Mariss Jansons, Giovanni Antonini, Philippe Herreweghe and Daniel Harding.
She has made several recordings for Harmonia Mundi with her recital partner Alexander Melnikov, including the complete Beethoven Sonatas for Piano and Violin. This recording was awarded the Diapason d’Or and the Gramophone Award. Her CDs of J.S. Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin won a Diapason d’Or de l’Année. Isabelle Faust’s recording of the Beethoven and Berg concertos, conducted by Claudio Abbado, was highly acclaimed by the international press and awarded a further Diapason d’Or, the Echo Klassik Prize, the Gramophone Award and the Academy Award in 2012.
She plays the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ Stradivarius (1704), kindly lent to her by the L-Bank Baden-Württemberg.