Jennifer Frautschi is one of the most refreshing and original young violinists on the musical scene today. Born in Pasadena, California, Jennifer Frautschi began the violin at the age of three. She was a student of Robert Lipsett at the Colburn School for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles. She also attended Harvard, the New England Conservatory of Music, and the Juilliard School, where she studied with Robert Mann.
Jennifer Frautschi is rapidly gaining acclaim as an adventurous performer with a wide-ranging repertoire. Equally at home in the classic repertoire as well as twentieth and twenty-first century works, in the past few seasons alone she has performed Britten’s Violin Concerto, Poul Ruders’ Concerto No. 1, Steven Mackey’s Violin Sonata, and Mendelssohn’s rarely played Concerto in D minor, along with standard concertos by Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Berg. Selected by Carnegie Hall for its Distinctive Débuts series, she made her New York recital début in April 2004. An avid chamber musician, she has appeared widely, with performances at the Caramoor International Music Festival, where she has performed annually since André Previn first invited her there as a Rising Star in 1992, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and La Jolla Summerfest. She has given premières of important new works by Oliver Knussen, Krzystof Penderecki, Michael Hersch and others, and has recorded for Naxos a Grammy-nominated album (8.557520), with Schoenberg’s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, conducted by Robert Craft who considers her one of the three or four finest violinists on the present musical scene.
Ms. Frautschi has performed with orchestras, at festivals and on recital series throughout the United States. She has appeared at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Ravinia Festival’s Rising Stars series, the Phillips Collection and the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and at the Gardner Museum in Boston. In Europe, Ms. Frautschi has toured Switzerland and Belgium, given live recital broadcasts on Radio Suisse-Romande and has performed at the Monnaie Opera House of Brussels and with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Flanders.
Ms. Frautschi has won several First Prize awards in prestigious competitions, including the Washington International Competition, the Irving Klein International String Competition, the Juilliard Concerto Competition and GM/Seventeen Magazine’s National Concerto Competition. She was named a United States Presidential Scholar in the Arts in 1990 and was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1999.
Jennifer Frautschi performs on a 1722 Antonio Stradivarius violin known as the “ex-Cadiz”, on generous loan to her from a private American foundation.
