The violinist Rolf Schulte was born in Germany and started playing the violin at the age of five under his father’s tutelage. He later studied with Kurt Schaffer at the Robert Schumann Conservatory in Düsseldorf, attended Yehudi Menuhin’s summer courses in Gstaad, Switzerland, and studied with Franco Gulli at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Italy, before moving to the United States to study with Ivan Galamian at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. His orchestral début came with the Philharmonia Hungarica in Cologne in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto when he was fourteen, and he has since performed with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Munich Philharmonic, the Frankfurt Museums-Orchester, the Stuttgart State Orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony, the Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice in Venice and the Radio Orchestras of Berlin (RSO), Cologne (WDR) and Stuttgart (SDR). In 1991 he appeared in a series of American music in Moscow, and played Roger Sessions’s Violin Concerto with the Radio Orchestra of the U.S.S.R. In America he has performed with the Seattle Symphony, the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Vermont and New Hampshire Symphonies. Among the works of which he has given the première are Donald Martino’s Violin Concerto and Romanza, Tobias Picker’s Concerto, Milton Babbitt’s The Joy of More Sextets and Little Goes a Long Way, Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronisms No. 9, and Elliott Carter’s Fantasy. American premières include Gyorgy Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments Paul Ruders’ Violin
