Antje Weithaas

Violinist Antje Weithaas has earned praise for her strength in a variety of repertory, ranging from Bach to Ligeti. She is also a chamber music player and a prominent educator. Weithaas has a large recording catalog stretching back to the early '90s. In the early 2020s, she began a cycle of Beethoven's violin sonatas with pianist Dénes Várjon; it reached its end in 2024 with the release of the album Beethoven: Violin Sonatas Nos. 1, 5, 6 & 10. Weithaas was born in Guben, on the German-Polish border in what was then East Germany, in 1966. She started violin lessons at age four. She studied at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in East Berlin, and she won a string of increasingly important honors culminating in a win at the Hannover International Violin Competition in 1991 (she later became the festival's artistic director). Two years later, she made her recording debut as a member of Trio Ex Aequo on the Discover label, with the album Schubert: Trio, Op. 99; Notturno, Op. 148. She began teaching at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, and in 2004, she moved to her alma mater, the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler; she remained on its faculty into the mid-2020s and also later taught at the Kronberg Academy. Weithaas has performed as a soloist with leading orchestras outside as well as in Germany, including the BBC Symphony, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony. Her repertory ranges from the Baroque to contemporary music and includes works by Bach, Mozart, Prokofiev, and Sofia Gubaidulina, among many other composers. She is quite active as a chamber player, with the Arcanto Quartet (along with violinist Daniel Sepec, violist Tabea Zimmermann, and cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras), and as half of a duo with pianist Silke Avenhaus. Her first recording as a solo player came in 2005 when she joined Avenhaus on the Avi label album Schubert: Works for Violin & Piano. She has continued to record for Avi and its cousin, CAvi-music, and has also recorded for Es-Dur, Alpha, CPO, and Harmonia Mundi. By 2024, when her CAvi-music Beethoven cycle with Várjon concluded, her recording catalog comprised more than 60 albums. ~ James Manheim, Rovi