Antje Weithaas
Violin
Violin
Biography
Antje Weithaas goes all out. She interprets Robert Schumann’s first violin sonata, a work that could previously be understood as slightly melancholy and a beautiful contribution to domestic music, as music full of loneliness and forlornness. Her ability to evoke hell with a single note immerses the music in the highest emotionality. She not only masters the entire spectrum of creative mastery – she also utilises it mercilessly (…) Antje Weithaas, and this is certain, is not just a violinist, she is a musician, and currently one of the best. rbb Kultur, 13/12/2023
With captivating energy and a fine sense for nuances, Antje Weithaas gives her audience a “stellar hour of music” (FAZ) time and again. Her wide stylistic range and unmistakable musical language are fascinating. Blessed with impressive technical mastery and an enormous gamut of sound, she manages the feat of finding very individual readings of the great masterpieces and yet unpretentiously placing herself at the service of the composer. She has an extensive repertoire that includes the great concertos by Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann, new works such as Jörg Widmann’s Violin Concerto, modern classics by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Ligeti and Gubaidulina, and lesser performed concertos by Hartmann and Schoeck.
As a soloist, Antje Weithaas has worked with most of Germany’s leading orchestras, including the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Bamberg Symphony and the major German radio orchestras, numerous major international orchestras such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra and the BBC Symphony, as well as and the leading orchestras of the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Asia. She has collaborated with the illustrious conductors Vladimir Ashkenazy, Dmitri Kitayenko, Sir Neville Marriner, Marc Albrecht, Yakov Kreizberg, Sakari Oramo and Carlos Kalmar.
Last season, Antje Weithaas completed the complete recording of Ludwig van Beethoven’s sonatas for piano and violin with Dénes Várjon as her piano partner on CAvi-music, digitally distributed by Deutsche Grammophon which was honoured with the German Record Critics’ Award 2024. Following her debut recital at the Pierre Boulez Saal Berlin, she and Dénes Várjon will perform the complete cycle there in May 2025. The two artists will continue to perform the entire cycle next season at the Casals Forum Kronberg and in Budapest, and will also perform Beethoven recitals in Italy.
Antje Weithaas is a sought-after conductor for play-conduct projects with international chamber orchestras. As artistic director of the Camerata Bern, she was responsible for the musical profile of the ensemble for almost ten years, with whom she continues to work regularly and whose next joint recordings on CAvi-music we can look forward to. From the podium of the concertmaster, she has even conducted large-scale works such as Beethoven’s symphonies and released recordings of works by Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mendelssohn and Beethoven. Her concerts as artiste associé of the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris in the 2021/22 season led to several new projects.
In 2013, Antje Weithaas produced a reference recording of the violin concertos by Beethoven and Berg with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra under Steven Sloane (CAvi-music). The Arcanto Quartet’s highly acclaimed recordings with Daniel Sepec, Tabea Zimmermann and Jean-Guihen Queyras, released on the Harmonia Mundi label, include works by Bartók, Brahms, Ravel, Dutilleux, Debussy, Schubert and Mozart. In 2016, her complete recording of Max Bruch’s works for violin and orchestra with the NDR Radiophilharmonie under Hermann Bäumer was released on cpo. There was also an enthusiastic response to the complete recording of the solo sonatas and partitas by Johann Sebastian Bach and the solo sonatas by Eugène Ysaÿe as well as Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and his 3rd String Quartet in an orchestral version with the Camerata Bern (CAvi). Two CDs were released in 2019: a recording of Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto and Johannes Brahms’ Double Concerto with the NDR Radiophilharmonie, cellist Maximilian Hornung and conductor Andrew Manze, which won the BBC Music Magazine’s “Concerto” Award, and a recording of Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto and Concerto Rhapsody with the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie and conductor Daniel Raiskin.
Antje Weithaas began playing the violin at the age of four and later studied at the Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” Berlin with Professor Werner Scholz. She won the Kreisler Competition in Graz in 1987 and the Bach Competition in Leipzig in 1988, as well as the Joseph Joachim International Violin Competition Hanover in 1991. Together with Oliver Wille, she has taken over the artistic leadership of the renowned Joachim competition. She taught as a professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin for several years before moving to the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in 2004. Since then, she has become a world-class violin teacher. She plays on a 2001 Peter Greiner violin.
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