Biography

Experiencing the cellist Christine Rauh, arguably 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 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 and Japan. Engagements include joint appearances with artists like Pavel Baleff, Tobias Hiller, 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 contributed to the Schwetzingen Festival in 2006, to the Kronberg Cello Festival in 2007, furthermore – appointed “Artist in Residence” – to the Euro-Nippon Music Festival in 2007 and to the Plovdiv International Chamber Music Festival in 2008; her first appearance with the Baden-Baden Philharmonic directed by Werner Stiefel in its regular concert series is envisaged for 2009.

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 Marco Stroppa (2001), Robert Dispa (2005), Ma Di (2006), Chen Yaoxing (2006), Krzysztof Penderecki (2007) and Friedemann Dähn (2008) 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 was awarded a Diploma di Merito along with a scholarship by the Accademia Musicale Chigiana twice in 2006 and 2007; she won the coveted Stennebrüggen Prize of the Carl Flesch Academy in 2008. A recipient of numerous first prizes and further scholarships from, e.g., the Oxford Music Festival (1994), the German National “Jugend musiziert” Competition (1996 and 1998), the Lenzewski Competition (2002), the Da Ponte Foundation (2002), the Rotary Club (2004), the Villa Musica Foundation (2004), the German National Music Competition (2005 and 2009), the German Music Council (2005 and 2009), the Kitakyushu International Music Academy (2007), 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 Friedrich Jürgen Sellheim Society (2009) and the Friends of the Carl Flesch Academy (2009), esteemed by highest praise in the semifinals of the Pablo Casals International Cello Competition (2004) and the Tchaikovsky International Competition (2007), 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 and Arto Noras in Baden-Baden, 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 “Tigre” cello by Amati Mangenot built in 1929, using an early 19th-century bow by Christian Wilhelm Knopf and a brand-new bow by Hans-Karl Schmidt on loan from the Gidon Kremer Instrument Fund.