Biography

Experiencing the cellist Christine Rauh, certainly one of the most promising talents of her generation, means being enthralled by a distinct personality combining phenomenal musicianship, audacious originality, technical brilliance and boisterous temperament with an overwhelming presence and projection on stage.

Christine Rauh first attracted wide public attention after having won a spellbound audience’s hearts with a virtuoso rendition of Camille Saint-Saëns’ A minor concerto at her solo debut in 1998. Since then she has been performing diligently as a soloist, as a recitalist of, e.g., the “Duo Parthenon” and as a chamber musician of the “Trio Con Anima”, concert tours having taken her not only throughout Germany, but also to Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Great Britain, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Russia, Korea and Japan. Engagements include joint appearances with artists like Pavel Baleff, Bong Kim, Werner Stiefel, Silke Avenhaus, José Gallardo, Kirill Krotov, Robert Levin, Keiko Tamura, David Geringas, Misha Maisky, Christian Altenburger and Eszter Haffner, to name a few. Christine Rauh made her debut at the Würzburg Mozart Festival and the Weiden Reger Festival in 2010, following her contributions to the Ettlingen Festival and the Tongyeong International Music Festival in 2009, to the Plovdiv International Chamber Music Festival in 2008, to the Kronberg Cello Festival and – appointed “Artist in Residence” – to the Euro-Nippon Music Festival in 2007 as well as to the Schwetzingen Festival in 2006.

Apart from cultivating the traditional repertoire of concertos and chamber music commencing with the period of the baroque, Christine Rauh places great emphasis on latest and challenging achievements of our day, a fact which can be traced to her keen intellectual curiosity. Noted for extraordinary skills at communicating music of this sort, she premiered compositions by Friedemann Dähn (2008), Krzysztof Penderecki (2007), Ma Di (2006), Chen Yaoxing (2006), Robert Dispa (2005) and Marco Stroppa (2001) to date. In a similar vein, highlights of her recital programmes of the ongoing concert season pay tribute to her marked interest in contemporary music of the Far East: the listeners are helped comprehend the selected works by Christine Rauh’s proficient introductions and demonstrations ushering in the actual presentation.

Renowned for artistic and emotional maturity too, Christine Rauh took the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Prize of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and the “Freunde Junger Musiker” Chamber Music Prize in 2010, the First Prize and the Isang Yun Special Prize of the Isang Yun International Cello Competition in 2009 as well as the Stennebrüggen Prize of the Baden-Baden Philharmonic in 2008; she was awarded a Diploma di Merito along with a scholarship by the Accademia Musicale Chigiana twice in 2007 and 2006. A recipient of numerous further prizes and scholarships from, e.g., the European Chamber Music Competition (2009), the Friedrich Jürgen Sellheim Society (2009), the Friends of the Carl Flesch Academy (2009), the German National Music Competition (2009 and 2005), the German Music Council (2009 and 2005), the Friends of Villa Musica (2008), the Paul Hindemith Society (2008), the Frieda Eichstätt Foundation (2008), the Lutz-E. Adolf Foundation (2008), the Marguerite von Grunelius Foundation (2008), the German “Musikleben” Foundation (2008), the Kitakyushu International Music Academy (2007), the Liezen International Cello Competition (2006), the Villa Musica Foundation (2004), the Rotary Club (2004), the Lenzewski Competition (2002), the Da Ponte Foundation (2002), the German National “Jugend musiziert” Competition (1998 and 1996) and the Oxford Music Festival (1994), esteemed by highest praise in the semifinals of the Tchaikovsky International Cello Competition (2007) and the Pablo Casals International Cello Competition (2004), she consistently distinguishes herself as a versatile and creative musician with enormous potential for coining and imparting new, path-breaking ideas

Christine Rauh was born in 1984 to her father, a physicist and materials scientist, and to her mother, a pianist and music pedagogue, in Osnabrück; she grew up in Oxford, however, and began learning the cello with Jonathan Beecher, former pupil of Rohan de Saram and Paul Tortelier, at the age of five. Following her return to Germany, she was welcomed to Frankfurt’s University of Music and the Performing Arts in 1999 to study with Gerhard Mantel, who himself was deeply inspired by the legendary Pablo Casals; she graduated from this institution with first-class honours in 2005, aged only 21. Having attended international master classes with Wolfgang Boettcher, Young-Chang Cho, David Geringas, Leonid Gorokhov, Frans Helmerson, Gary Hoffman, Gerhard Mantel, Arto Noras and Heinrich Schiff in Baden-Baden, Berlin, Kronberg, Leipzig, Siena, Montpellier, Prades, Vienna and Vaduz and having gained additional stimulus through projects with Mstislav Rostropovich and Philippe Muller in Paris, she currently rounds off graduate studies in solo and recital work with Jens Peter Maintz at Berlin’s University of the Arts; she already completed such studies in chamber music with Markus Becker at Hanover’s University of Music and Theatre in 2009, when she was awarded first-class honours for her concert exam the same year.

Christine Rauh plays the Giovanni Battista Rogeri cello of 1671, entrusted by the German “Musikleben” Foundation from the German Musical Instruments Fund, and the “Tigre” cello by Amati Mangenot built in 1929, using an early nineteenth-century bow by Christian Wilhelm Knopf.