Celebrated worldwide as one of today’s leading soloists, Arabella Steinbacher is known for her extraordinarily varied repertoire, comprising of pieces from the classical and romantic eras, alongside modernist concerto works of Bartók, Berg, Britten, Glazunov, Gubaidulina, Hartmann, Hindemith, Khachaturian, Milhaud, Prokofiev, Schnittke, Shostakovich and Szymanowski.
Arabella Steinbacher opens the 2022/23 season with a concert at the Klosters Festival in Switzerland, where she appears with Mozarteumorchester Salzburg and Patrick Hahn, followed by a tour to Spain with Camerata Salzburg. This season, she has also been invited to return to the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and will perform concerts with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de Belgique, Münchner Symphoniker, Württembergisches
Kammerorchester as well as Orchestra del Teatro Petruzzelli di Bari and Ulster Orchestra Belfast.
Further afield, she returns to the stages of the Seattle Symphony, NHK Symphony Orchestra and Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra. Another highlight of this season will be the return to Sydney Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Umberto Clerici, for the World Premiere of Georges Lentz’s violin concerto, which he has written for Arabella.
Other orchestras she has collaborated with include the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Dresdner Philharmonie, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin. Arabella also performed to great acclaim with the London Symphony Orchestra and Orchestre National de France, ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien as well as the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra. She has toured extensively with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg and Deutsche Radiophilharmonie Saarbrücken.
Arabella works with conductors such as Marin Alsop, Herbert Blomstedt, Christoph von Dohnányi, Christoph Eschenbach, Lawrence Foster, Jakub Hrůša, Pietari Inkinen, Marek Janowski, Vladimir Jurowski, Fabio Luisi, Zubin Mehta, Andris Nelsons, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Kirill Petrenko, John Storgårds and Kazuki Yamada.
Her extensive discography impressively demonstrates her diverse repertoire. Her most recent recording for Pentatone, whom she records for exclusively, concludes her highly praised Mozart recording cycle with Festival Strings Lucerne. Just as successful was her previous recording featuring “The Four Seasons” of both, Astor Piazzolla and Antonio Vivaldi, which was recorded with the violinist play/directing the Münchener Kammerorchester. The disc was released in summer 2020 and received rapturous reviews, the Guardian’s 5-star review ending simply with “what a player”. On her upcoming recording with the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester Arabella juxtaposes works by Johann Sebastian Bach and Arvo Pärt.
Born into a family of musicians, she has played the violin since the age of three and studied with Ana Chumachenco at the University of Music and Theatre, Munich since the age of eight. A source of musical inspiration and guidance of hers is Israeli violinist Ivry Gitlis.
Arabella currently plays the violins of Antonio Stradivari, Cremona 1718, known as the „ex Benno Walter“, and the Guarneri del Gesu „Sainton“, Cremona 1744, both generously provided by a private Swiss Foundation.