Arabella Miho Steinbacher (born 14 November 1981) is a German classical violinist.

Biography

Steinbacher was born in Munich to a Japanese mother and a German father. When she was three, her mother read that a German violin teacher had recently returned from Japan after studying the Suzuki method. Steinbacher started violin lessons at that time. When she was nine years old, she was enrolled at the Munich College of Music and mentored by Ana Chumachenco. Steinbacher came into contact with Ivry Gitlis, and took part in master classes by Dorothy DeLay and Kurt Sassmannshaus in Aspen, Colorado. She won several important prizes (the Joseph Joachim International Violin Competition in Hanover), and a grant from the Free State of Bavaria in 2001, then became a student of Anne-Sophie Mutter's Freundeskreis ("Circle of friends"). Steinbacher frequently appears with world-class orchestras around the globe including the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Cleveland Orchestra. She has made acclaimed performances with the NDR Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, São Paulo Symphony, Orchestre National de France, Vienna Symphony, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. She has collaborated with conductors including Lorin Maazel, Christoph von Dohnányi, Riccardo Chailly, Herbert Blomstedt, Zubin Mehta, Christoph Eschenbach, Charles Dutoit, Marek Janowski, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Thomas Hengelbrock. Her recording with Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski features the Hindemith and Britten violin concertos. Arabella Steinbacher has been recording exclusively for PENTATONE since 2009. Among many international and national music prizes and nominations, she has been twice awarded the ECHO Klassik. As CARE ambassador, Steinbacher is driven to use music as a means to uplift and support those in need. She launched a December 2011 Japan tour in response to the tsunami disaster earlier that year. The DVD release Arabella Steinbacher – Music of Hope featured her outreach, and youth recitals from this tour and was released shortly after. Steinbacher currently plays the Booth Stradivarius (1716) provided by the Nippon Music Foundation. She married Wolfgang Schaufler, publisher at Universal Edition, Vienna, in 2017. In April 2023, Steinbacher is due to premiere a new violin concerto, "To beam in distant heavens...", by composer Georges Lentz.

Prizes and honours

Recordings