Vinciane Beranger

Violist Vinciane Béranger has had a varied career as a chamber player, soloist, and educator. Her work has found favor among a wide range of contemporary composers. Béranger grew up in Paris. At age 16, she entered the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSM), where she studied with Gérard Caussé. She graduated in 1990 after earning first prizes in both piano and chamber music. Béranger went on to the Musikhochschule Freiburg in Germany under a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship, studying there with the contemporary music-oriented violist Kim Kashkashian and earning a degree in 1992. Again earning prestigious financial support (a Fulbright fellowship and the French government's Lavoisier scholarship), Béranger headed that fall for the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. She graduated from the Curtis Institute in 1995, by which time she had already begun her career (in 2003) as a member of the Manfred Quartet. With that group, she made appearances in top international venues, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, and the Salle Gaveau and Salle Chopin-Pleyel in Paris. After appearing on pop albums by Jane Birkin and Gilbert Bécaud, she made her classical recording debut on a 2001 album of music for viola and piano (and clarinet) by Robert Schumann. In 2009, Béranger left the Manfred Quartet and took a new job on the faculty of the Conservatoire du 6ème Arrondissement in Paris, also known as the Municipal Conservatory Jean-Philippe Rameau. She has become an influential educator who has taught at the Saint-Maur-des-Fossés Conservatory in France, as well as giving master classes, sitting on juries, and operating teacher training courses at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris. In 2020, she joined the faculty of the Haute Ecole de Musique (HEMU) in Lausanne, Switzerland. Meanwhile, Béranger's careers as a performer and recording artist were flourishing. She has performed as a soloist with orchestras in Europe and the U.S. and has appeared at such major festivals as the Marlboro Music Festival in the U.S., the Festival d'Aix and other festivals in France, and La Folle Journée in Tokyo. In concert, she has played works by such major composers as György Kurtag, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Thierry Pécou. Béranger recorded several albums for the Zig Zag Territoires label, moving in 2022 to Aparte for the album Rebecca Clarke: Works for Viola.
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