Ariane Haering & Benjamin Schmid
Ariane Haering, piano
The Swiss pianist Ariane Haering first studied in her home town of La Chaux-de-Fonds with Cécile Pantillon and Catherine Courvoisier. She then spent a year at the University of North Carolina with Clifton Matthews, graduating in 1996 with a ‘1er Prix de Virtuosité avec les félicitations du Jury’ in Brigitte Meyer’s class. She has continued to expand her repertoire, soon spanning five centuries of music, and has shared the podium with artists such as Benjamin Schmid, Dimitri Ashkenazy, Clemens Hagen, Veronika Hagen, Matthias Bartolomey, Matthias Schorn, Ramon Jaffé, Ib Hausmann, Bernard Richter and the Doric, Brodsky, Petersen and Mozarteum Quartets.
Her performances at the Salzburg Festival, the Salzburg Mozart Week, the Mozarteum Foundation, at the Vienna Musikverein and Konzerthaus and at the Ruhr Piano Festival secured her reputation as an international artist.
In 2016, Ariane Haering became a member of the ‘Alban Berg Ensemble Vienna’. Since its foundation, this ensemble has performed its own cycle in the Brahms Saal of the Musikverein and organises the annual ‘BergFrühling’ festival at Lake Ossiach. Their first CD production for Deutsche Grammophon will be released in 2020.
Solo highlights have also included concerts with the Houston Symphony Orchestra under the baton of chief conductor Hans Graf, at Tonhalle Zurich, Grosses Festspielhaus Salzburg, KKL Lucerne, Casino Bern and Basel.
Benjamin Schmid, violin
Since his debut at the Salzburg Festival as solo partner of Sir Yehudi Menuhin in 1986, Benjamin Schmid has developed into one of the most important violinists of our time with his worldwide, consistently intense concert activity in about 3000 live concerts.
Winning the Carl Flesch Competition in London in 1992, where he was also awarded the Mozart Prize, the Beethoven Prize and the Audience Prize, brought the Vienna-born violinist his international breakthrough, along with other competition prizes.
Since then, he has performed on the world’s most important stages with renowned orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic, the Philharmonia Orchestra London, the St Petersburg Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Leipzig Gewandthaus Orchestra and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich.
His brilliant technique, the clarity and passion of his expression, his charisma as a soloist, the extraordinary range of his repertoire – in addition to all the usual works, he also plays the violin concertos by Wolf Ferrari, Gulda, Korngold, Elgar, Weill, Dutilleux and Weinberg – and his improvisational jazz skills give him a unique profile. Benjamin Schmid has appeared several times with the Vienna Philharmonic in TV concerts broadcast worldwide: with Seiji Ozawa at the Salzburg Festival or with Valery Gergiev at the Schönbrunn Summer Night Concert. Both have been released on CD and DVD by Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft and OehmsClassics. Several documentary films about Benjamin Schmid, which have been broadcast worldwide, underscore the violinist’s extraordinary reputation.