Isabelle Faust inspires her audiences through first-class musical interpretations characterized by profundity and intensity. She approaches each work with respect for and understanding of its musical context and its authentic instrumentation.
Since winning prizes at the International Violin Competition Leopold Mozart and the Premio Paganini in Genoa at a very young age, she has appeared regularly with the world‘s most prestigious orchestras, such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Les Siècles and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. This has resulted in close collaborations with conductors including Giovanni Antonini, John Eliot Gardiner, Daniel Harding, Philippe Herreweghe, Jakub Hrůša, Klaus Mäkelä, François-Xavier Roth, Robin Ticciati and Simon Rattle.
Isabelle Faust’s artistic curiosity encompasses all epochs and musical forms. As well as the great violin concertos, her performance highlights have included interpretations of Schubert’s Octet on original instruments, György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments with Anna Prohaska and Stravinsky’s L‘Histoire du soldat with Dominique Horwitz. In addition, she is a notable interpreter of contemporary music. She has given premieres of works by composers including Peter Eötvös, Brett Dean, Ondřej Adámek and Rune Glerup and most recently, in May 2026, premiered Vito Žuraj’s violin concerto Desorption.
Other highlights of the 2025/26 season have included performances at the Lucerne Festival, with the Orchestre de Paris, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden and the Munich Philharmonic, tours with Les Siècles and the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble and residencies with the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam.
She has appeared as a chamber musician with Kristian Bezuidenhout, with her long-term duo partner Alexander Melnikov, and with Jörg Widmann, Jean-Guihen Queyras and Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
Isabelle Faust’s numerous recordings have won prizes such as the Diapason d’Or, the Gramophone Classical Music Award and the Choc de l’année. Her major recordings include Bach’s solo sonatas and partitas and the Beethoven and Berg violin concertos under Claudio Abbado, Britten’s Violin Concerto with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the two Baroque albums Il virtuoso, il poeta and Solo, and Ligeti’s Violin Concerto with Les Siècles, released in 2025 by harmonia mundi.
