Viviane Hagner

Violinist Viviane Hagner arrived on the international scene at the age of 13 in a major way by performing in Tel Aviv with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Zubin Mehta for a joint concert between the Berlin and Israel Philharmonics. Hagner has since gone on to perform with leading orchestras and conductors throughout Europe and the U.S. She is active as a chamber musician and is a noted educator. Hagner was born in 1977 in Munich but grew up in Berlin. Her sister, Nicole Hagner, is a pianist, and the sisters have performed as the Nicole and Viviane Hagner Duo. Viviane began piano lessons at age three before switching to the violin at four and studying with Abraham Jaffé. At ten, she began studies on piano and violin as a pre-college student at the Julius-Stern-Institut in Berlin. She later had violin studies with Thomas Zehetmair and Thomas Brandis. Hagner made her international concert debut at age 12, followed the next year by her appearance in Tel Aviv with the Israel Philharmonic in a performance of Saint-Saëns' Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. She continued her studies with Victor Liberman at Amsterdam's Sweelinck Conservatory. In 1996, on advice from Daniel Barenboim, Hagner met Pinchas Zukerman, who invited her to study at the Manhattan School of Music, where she also studied with Patinka Kopec. Hagner made her New York debut at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall in 1999, performing Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante with Zukerman. She has since performed as a soloist with Zukerman's National Arts Centre Orchestra, including joining Yo-Yo Ma for Brahms' Double Concerto. Hagner plays the 1717 Stradivarius violin "Sasserno," on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation. In 2000, she won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions. An advocate of new music as well as lesser-known or neglected works, Hagner has taken on the music of composers such as Sofia Gubaidulina, Witold Lutosławski, and Krzysztof Penderecki. Unsuk Chin dedicated her Violin Concerto to Hagner, who premiered the work in 2002 with Kent Nagano leading the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester. The following year, she made her recording debut on the EMI Classics label with an album of works by Beethoven, Saint-Saëns, and Schubert, accompanied by her sister Nicole. With the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Nott, Hagner premiered Simon Holt's violin concerto in 2006. In 2009, she served as the artist-in-residence at the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival, became a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, and issued a recording of Chin's Violin Concerto, with Nagano leading the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. Hagner issued a recording of Christian Jost's concerto TiefenRausche in 2012, with the composer conducting the Essener Philharmoniker. She left her Berlin post in 2013 to take a professorship at the Mannheim Conservatory of Music and Performing Arts. Hagner founded the Krzyżowa-Music Festival in 2015 and serves as its artistic director. She joined the dogma chamber orchestra for the second volume of its Mendelssohn Project in 2021, on which she performed the composer's Violin Concerto in D minor.
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