Susanne Stanzeleit

Renowned as a soloist and chamber musician world-wide, Susanne Stanzeleit is well known for her unusually challenging and extensive repertoire, featuring many commissions and UK premieres of works by composers such as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Anthony Payne, John Adams, Lou Harrison, György Kurtág, Dmitri Smirnov, John Casken, Piers Hellawell, Jacques Cohen, Peter Fribbins, Sally Beamish, John Woolrich, Philip Cashian, Louis Andriessen, Rebecca Saunders and many more. Between 2008 and 2013 Susanne lead the Maggini Quartet, one of the finest and most recorded string quartets in the UK today. She was leader of the Werethina String Quartet for many years and led the Edinburgh String Quartet between 1999-2002. She is also in high demand as guest-leader of many of the foremost chamber orchestras, ensembles and contemporary music groups in the UK. A popular chamber musician, she has performed with eminent artists such as Gervase de Peyer, Eduard Brunner, Zara Nelsova, Colin Carr, Raphael Wallfisch, Alexander Baillie, Steven Doane, Norbert Brainin and Michael Collins, as well as regular pianist partners, Gusztáv Fenyö and Julian Jacobson. In 2004 she founded the Primrose Piano Quartet together with Robin Ireland, Andrew Fuller and John Thwaites. Susanne has received rave reviews and a Gramophone Award nomination for her long list of commercial recordings, which feature the complete works of Bartók, Enescu, Delius and Dvorák as well as Beethoven violin sonatas, works by Charles Camilleri and a series of English sonata recordings, the latest featuring Elgar, Ireland and Bridge on Meridian. Chamber discs include six discs with the Edinburgh Quartet, chamber music by Kenneth Leighton and the première recording of piano quartets by Hurlstone, Alwyn, Scott and Dunhill within two discs of British piano quartets with the Primrose Quartet, all on Meridian. Recent releases include music by Arnold Cooke, the chamber works of Richard Strauss, Elgar, Schubert, Brahms and Faure and a disc of commissions by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Dmitri Smirnov, John Casken, Piers Hellawell, Sally Beamish and others. Susanne Stanzeleit studied with Leonid Kogan, Nathan Milstein, Vesselin Paraschkevov, Yfrah Neaman, Sándor Végh and György Kurtág, and she is regularly invited to teach and give masterclasses at major UK music colleges and summer schools such as Dartington, Cadenza, Paxos, Ayton, Paxton and others. From 1993-2000 she was visiting lecturer of violin and chamber music at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, and between 2002 - 2006 Head of Strings at the London College of Music and Media. She now teaches violin and chamber music at the Birmingham Conservatoire. Susanne was also appointed producer for Meridian Records in 2006 and has mastered over 100 CDs to date.