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The German violinist, Nadja Zwiener, was brought up in an academic and scientific household. Nadja and her brother nonetheless inherited from their parents the conviction that it was art and culture that bound life together and gave significance to learning. She studied at Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin (Class of 2000). large part of her musical education was spent as a founding member of the Kuss Quartett at the Musikgymnasium Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach in East Berlin. At the quartet’s inception the three upper voices swapped roles; this meant that already as a teenager, she became used to understanding music as a conversation between equals. The desire to immerse herself in a new culture (and the travel opportunities that arose after the fall of the Berlin Wall) brought her to London for postgraduate studies at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama (Class of 2001). It was here that she had her real moment of revelation as a Baroque violinist. Asked to play in the band for Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610, she assumed the music would be too dry and too remote to have any emotional impact on her. The reality changed the direction of her career profoundly. The combination of instruments and voices, of richness and clarity, of exotic timbres and unfamiliar harmonic structures was inspirational; the method of working, with Christian Curnyn bringing singers and instrumentalists together into a true collaboration, seemed to combine the thrill of large-scale music-making with the intimate approach of a chamber musician.
Nadja Zwiener performed with several British early music ensembles before working with William Christie and Emmanuelle Haïm as concert-master, in which capacity she has since collaborated with Simon Rattle, John Eliot Gardiner, Trevor Pinnock, René Jacobs and Laurence Cummings, among others. She has been concert-master of The English Concert since 2007, with whom she performs regularly as a soloist and has made numerous radio and CD recordings as well as touring worldwide not only to major concert halls such as Carnegie Hall in New York, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Musikverein in Vienna and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, but also to various churches and many festivals. She has performed violin concertos by J.S. Bach, W.A. Mozart, Tartini and Antonio Vivaldi at the Wigmore Hall in London, the Bachfest Leipzig, the Bath Mozartfest and the Bach Academie in Bruges as well as in the USA, South America and Asia. As the leader of The English Concert, she has enjoyed varied roles as leader, chamber musician and concerto soloist amongst colleagues who are as able to give musical impulses as to receive them.
As a proud Thuringian living in Leipzig, Nadja Zwiener feels very at home in the music of J.S. Bach, so was delighted to be invited by conductor Hans-Christoph Rademann to help form and to lead a new period instrument orchestra for the Bachakademie Stuttgart in 2016. She was concert-master of the Bachakademie Stuttgart from September 2016 to March 2022 and played a leading role in establishing the new period instrument ensemble there, the Gaechinger Cantorey. Here she focuses on one defining composer and repertoire, with its own defining sound based on the middle-German tradition. This is the perfect balance for her work with Harry Bicket, Kristian Bezuidenhout and The English Concert, whose kaleidoscopic and collaborative approach offers the same qualities that first struck her at those Monteverdi rehearsals twenty years ago. She has also been a member of other ensembles, including Capella Thuringia (Director: Bernhard Klapprott), European Brandenburg Ensemble (Director: Trevor Pinnock), Pauliner Barockensemble (Director: David Timm).
Nadja Zwiener's professional passions are chamber music for various combinations of instruments and working with singers, although she is also inspired by cross-genre projects, creating interesting chamber music programmes that might go as far as combining Early Music with improvised, electronic or Contemporary music and dance. She works closely with the electronic composer Johannes Malfatti (Berlin) and the choreographer Emanuele Soavi (Cologne). Her regular chamber music partners in early music include Kristian Bezuidenhout, Joseph Crouch and Maurice Steger. Nadja Zwiener and Johannes Lang, the current organist of the Thomaskirche, have marked J.S. Bach's anniversary year of 2023 to found a new early music ensemble in Leipzig: the Collegium Musicum ’23. She also taught Baroque violin at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt in Weimar (September 2013-July 2019).
Nadja Zwiener’s violin playing has been described as “breathtakingly…” and “insanely virtuosic”. Her own priority on the concert platform, however, is direct communication — an exchange which leaves both performer and audience emotionally, intellectually and physically moved. For those critics and others who seek instead the thrill of insane virtuosity, an example can easily be found in Nadja’s recent recording with The English Concert of Tartini’s Concerto in B minor. |
