Augustin Hadelich

Violinist Augustin Hadelich came on the scene in the late 2000s decade with major awards and fellowships. One of the most active violinists on the scene, he has championed a noteworthy amount of contemporary music.
Hadelich was born on April 4, 1984, in Cecina, Tuscany, Italy. His parents were Germans who operated a farm in the area, and his father was an amateur cellist on the side. Hadelich began violin studies at age five, and he also played the piano. Taking lessons from violinists who toured the area, he developed a reputation as a child prodigy. Hadelich’s musical education was interrupted, however, by a fire on the family farm in 1999 that left him with serious burns. Airlifted to Germany for treatment, he took a year to recover. Then Hadelich enrolled at the Instituto Mascagni in nearby Livorno, graduating with honors and winning admission to the Juilliard School in New York. He settled there permanently, becoming an American citizen in 2014. Hadelich earned a graduate diploma in 2005 and an artist diploma in 2007 from Juilliard. A 2006 win at the International Violin Competition in Indianapolis helped jump-start his career, as did a last-minute substitute slot for Julian Rachlin at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2008. Since then, Hadelich has had a flourishing concert career in both the U.S. and Europe. He has appeared with the New York Philharmonic (making his debut in 2010), the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony, and most of the other major orchestras in North America. He has also toured widely in Europe, and in 2019, he was named Artist in Association with the NDR Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, for a three-year term. In 2018, Hadelich was named Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year.
Beginning with a 2008 recording of Haydn violin concertos for Naxos, Hadelich recorded for various labels, most prominently Avie, through the 2010s. A breakthrough came when he was signed to the Warner Classics label in 2018 and released an acclaimed recording of Paganini's 24 Caprices. He followed that up with a 2019 album devoted to the Brahms and Ligeti violin concertos, and in 2020 with Bohemian Tales, an album of Czech music. ~ James Manheim