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Thomas Zehetmair has fashioned a highly successful and broadly eclectic career. He is a virtuoso violinist of international repute, a chamber player who has founded a critically acclaimed quartet, a conductor of front-rank status, and a musician whose repertory in any role reaches from Baroque-era fare to the contemporary.
Zehetmair was born in Salzburg, Austria, on November 23, 1961. He began violin lessons at five with his parents, both talented violinists. His advanced studies were at the Salzburg Mozarteum under his father, Helmut. He took further instruction on the violin from
Nathan Milstein and Max Rostal.
Zehetmair worked busily at establishing an international reputation throughout the 1980s, and by 1990, he regularly appeared to acclaim at major concert venues from New York to Berlin to Tokyo. In 1993, he took on his first conducting post when he became co-director of the
Camerata Bern. The following year he founded the
Zehetmair Quartet, consequently dividing his time among solo performances, chamber concerts, and conducting.
His repertoire spans from Baroque-era fare, particularly
Bach, up through
Mozart,
Haydn, and
Beethoven, and extending to
Bartók,
Schoenberg, and
Berg, as well as to contemporary composers such as
Heinz Holliger,
Valentin Silvestrov, and
Wilhelm Killmayer. In the concertos of
Mozart,
Haydn,
Beethoven, and other pre-modern composers,
Zehetmair often provides his own cadenzas, and in these works and those of
Bach, he frequently appears as soloist while conducting the orchestra. He employs certain historic performance practices in early works, having studied such details with
Nikolaus Harnoncourt. In the chamber realm, he has collaborated with world-class musicians, including pianists
Alfred Brendel and
Cyprien Katsaris, and violinist
Gidon Kremer. As a soloist,
Zehetmair has appeared with leading orchestras across the globe, including the
Berlin and
Vienna Philharmonic orchestras, the
Dresden State,
NHK (Tokyo),
Cleveland, and
Philadelphia orchestras, and the
Boston Symphony.
Zehetmair was the music director of the
Northern Sinfonia from 2002-2014, after which he was named conductor laureate. He was the music director of the
Orchestre de Chambre de Paris from 2012-2014. In 2016, he became the principal conductor of the
Musikkollegium Winterthur, and the following year, the
Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra announced his appointment as chief conductor beginning in 2019.
He has made numerous recordings spread over a variety of labels, including EMI, Philips, Teldec, and Warner Classics. Among these are the 2005 Berlin Classics release of
Vivaldi's Four Seasons, with the
Camerata Bern, and the 2007 Avie recording of the
Schumann Fourth Symphony and Brahms Violin Concerto, where
Zehetmair appears with the
Northern Sinfonia both as soloist (in the
Brahms) and conductor. In 2019, he issued an album of
Bach's solo sonatas and partitas for violin on ECM New Series.