Jennifer Frautschi

Two-time GRAMMY nominee and Avery Fisher career grant recipient Jennifer Frautschi has garnered worldwide acclaim as a musically adventurous violinist with a wide-ranging repertoire.   As the Chicago Tribune noted, "violinist Jennifer Frautschi is molding a career with smart interpretations of both warhorses and rarities."  Equally at home in the classic and contemporary repertoire, her recent seasons have featured innumerable performances and recordings of works ranging from Brahms and Schumann to Berg and Schoenberg.  She has also had the privilege of premiering several new works composed for her by prominent composers of today.

In the 2017-18 season, Ms. Frautschi appears as soloist with the Cincinatti Symphony Orchestra, performs a ‘reimagining’ of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with Asheville Symphony, and gives two repeat performances of the James Stephenson’s Violin Concerto, a work she premiered with Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä, at the Cabrillo Festival and Elgin Symphony.  She will also perform with the Brevard, Des Moines, Elgin, Kalamazoo, Santa Barbara, and Wheeling Symphonies, as well as at the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Winter Festival, Chanel’s Pygmalion Series in Tokyo, and the St. Barth’s Music Festival. 

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 recent seasons include Barber Concerto with the orchestra of the Teatro di San Carlo Opera House in Naples, James Conlon conducting; and performances with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Boston and Buffalo Philharmonics, the Eugene, Jacksonville, Milwaukee, New Jersey, Tucson, and Utah Symphonies, as well as return engagements with the Rhode Island Philharmonic and the Alabama, Arkansas, Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Chattanooga, Portland, and Phoenix Symphonies. 

Selected by Carnegie Hall for its Distinctive Debuts series, she made her New York recital debut in Weill Hall; and as part of the European Concert Hall Organization's Rising Stars series, debuted at ten of Europe's most celebrated concert venues, including the Salzburg Mozarteum, Vienna Konzerthaus, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, La Cité de la Musique in Paris, and Brussels’ Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie.  She has also been heard in recital at the Ravinia Festival, La Jolla Chamber Music Society, Washington's Phillips Collection, Boston's Gardner Museum, Beijing's Imperial Garden, Monnaie Opera in Brussels, La Chaux des Fonds in Switzerland, and San Miguel de Allende Festival in Mexico. 

Ms. Frautschi performs regularly at the Caramoor Center for the Arts, where she was first invited by André Previn to play as a “Rising Star” at the age of 18, during her freshman year at Harvard.

As a chamber artist she has appeared at the Boston and Lincoln Center Chamber Music Societies; the Cape Cod, Charlottesville, Lake Champlain, La Musica (Sarasota), Moab, Newport, Ojai, Salt Bay, Santa Fe, Seattle, and Spoleto USA Chamber Music Festivals; Bravo! Vail, Chamber Music Northwest, La Jolla Summerfest,and Music@Menlo; and at the Library of Congress, New York’s Metropolitan and Guggenheim Museums of Art, the 92nd Street Y, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and Mainly Mozart in San Diego. Internationally, she has performed at the Cartagena International Music Festival in Columbia, the Spoleto Festival of the Two Worlds and Rome Chamber Music Festival in Italy, Pharo’s Trust in Cyprus, Kutna Hora Festival in the Czech Republic, St. Barth's Music Festival in the French West Indies, and toured England with musicians from Prussia Cove, culminating in a concert in London’s Wigmore Hall.  She has premiered important new works by Barbara White, Mason Bates, Oliver Knussen, Krzysztof Penderecki, Michael Hersch, and others, and has appeared at New York's George Crumb Festival and Stefan Wolpe Centenary Concerts. 

Her extensive discography includes several discs for Naxos: the Stravinsky Violin Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, conducted by the legendary Robert Craft, and two GRAMMY-nominated recordings with the Fred Sherry Quartet, of Schoenberg's Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra [nominated for ‘Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (with Orchestra)’ in 2006] and the Schoenberg Third String Quartet [nominated for ‘Best Chamber Music Performance’ in 2011].  Her most recent releases are with pianist John Blacklow on Albany Records: the first devoted to the three sonatas of Robert Schumann, including the rarely performed posthumous sonata (released in 2014); the second, American Duos, an exploration of recent additions to the violin and piano repertoire by contemporary American composers Barbara White, Steven Mackey, Elena Ruehr, Dan Coleman, and Stephen Hartke (released in 2015). She also recorded three widely-praised CDs for Artek: an orchestral recording of the Prokofiev concerti with Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony; the violin music of Ravel and Stravinsky; and20th century works for solo violin. Other recent recordings include a disc of Romantic Horn Trios, with hornist Eric Ruske and pianist Stephen Prutsman, and the Stravinsky Duo Concertant with pianist Jeremy Denk.   

Born in Pasadena, California, Ms. Frautschi began the violin at age three. She was a student of Robert Lipsett at the Colburn School for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles. She also attended Harvard, the New England Conservatory of Music, and The Juilliard School, where she studied with Robert Mann. She currently teaches violin in the graduate program at Stony Brook University.  She performs on a 1722 Antonio Stradivarius violin known as the "ex-Cadiz," on generous loan to her from a private American foundation.