Jennifer Frautschi
Two-time GRAMMY nominee and Avery Fisher career grant recipient Jennifer Frautschi has gained acclaim as an adventurous musician with a wide-ranging repertoire. As the Chicago Tribune wrote, “violinist Jennifer Frautschi is molding a career with smart interpretations of both warhorses and rarities.” Equally at home in the classic repertoire as well as twentieth and twenty-first century works, in recent seasons she has focused on such composers as Berg, Schoenberg, Prokofiev and Schumann, and premiered several new works composed for her.
Ms. Frautschi has appeared as soloist with Pierre Boulez and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Christoph Eschenbach and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival, and at Wigmore Hall and Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival. Highlights of Ms. Frautschi’s 2013-14 season include performances with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Tucson Symphony, as well as return engagements with the Alabama, Arkansas, Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Chattanooga, Phoenix, and Toledo Symphonies and the Rhode Island Philharmonic. She will also return to DaCamera of Houston and the Helicon Foundation in New York for concerts on all-gut strings with period instruments. Recent seasons include the world premiere of James Stephenson’s Violin Concerto, a piece written for her, with the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä; Barber Concerto with the orchestra of the Teatro di San Carlo Opera House in Naples, James Conlon conducting; and performances with the Eugene, Jacksonville, Milwaukee, and Utah Symphonies, and the Buffalo Philharmonic.
Ms. Frautschi performs regularly at the Caramoor Center for the Arts, where she has appeared annually since she was first invited by André Previn to play there as a “Rising Star” at the age of 18, during her freshman year at Harvard. As a chamber artist she appears often at the Boston Chamber Music Society, Chamber Music Northwest (in Portland, OR), and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.
Her discography includes three widely-praised CDs for Artek: an orchestral recording of the Prokofiev concerti with Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony, and highly-acclaimed discs of music of Ravel and Stravinsky, and of 20th century works for solo violin. She has also recorded several discs for Naxos, including the Stravinsky Violin Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, conducted by the legendary Robert Craft, and two GRAMMY-nominated recordings of Schoenberg’s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra and the Schoenberg Third String Quartet. Her most recent releases are a recording of Romantic Horn Trios, with hornist Eric Ruske and pianist Stephen Prutsman, and the Stravinsky Duo Concertant with pianist Jeremy Denk.
She performs on a 1722 Antonio Stradivarius violin known as the “ex-Cadiz,” on generous loan to her from a private American foundation.