“Today, Lena Neudauer is a highly acclaimed artist, captivating global audiences with the clarity, power, grace, and soulful essence of her violin performances.” (Focus)
Lena Neudauer was born in Munich in 1984 and commenced playing the violin at the tender age of three. At age 11, she joined Helmut Zehetmair’s class at the Mozarteum Salzburg. At the age of 15, Lena Neudauer gained global recognition for winning the Leopold Mozart Competition in Augsburg and being awarded nearly all the special prizes.
Lena Neudauer studied with Christoph Poppen, as well as Helmut and Thomas Zehetmair. Her openness and commitment to a wide range of musical styles have continually shaped her development, including her experiences with Boulez and his “Lucerne Festival Academy,” as well as her engagement with historically informed performance practice. She has a particular affinity for the music of Mozart, which she studied intensively.
In 2010, at the age of 26, Lena Neudauer was appointed professor of violin at the Hochschule für Musik Saar, and since 2016, she has held a professorship at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München.
In 2023, Lena Neudauer and Julia Fischer deepened their long-standing musical and personal friendship with a wonderful music project. The two Munich violinists presented a musical monument: Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1, composed in 1977 for Gidon Kremer and Tatiana Grindenko, performed with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and the Kammerakademie Potsdam.
Numerous recordings document Lena Neudauer’s clear interpretative ideas:
In May 2010, her debut CD was released by Hänssler Classic, featuring the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie under the direction of Pablo Gonzalez. This complete recording of Robert Schumann’s works for violin and orchestra won the International Classical Music Award (ICMA) for Best Concert Recording in 2011. In 2013, she released a chamber music CD featuring works by Maurice Ravel (with Paul Rivinius on piano and Julian Steckel on cello). In the following years, she published her recording of Mozart’s violin concertos with the Deutsche Radiophilharmonie under Bruno Weil (Hänssler Classic, 2014), as well as Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in D minor and the Double Concerto with Matthias Kirschnereit (cpo, 2018).
To celebrate the Beethoven anniversary, a CD featuring Beethoven’s Violin Concerto Op. 61 and the Romances 1 & 2 was released, in collaboration with Cappella Aquileia under the direction of Marcus Bosch (cpo, 2019). This recording was enthusiastically hailed by critics as a milestone and a new reference recording (including reviews in Pizzicato, Fono Forum, Crescendo) and received the Supersonic Award.
“Together with Marcus Bosch and Cappella Aquileia, Lena Neudauer manages to present an interpretation that honors both historically informed practice and the classical romantic gesture, as well as a modern reading. […] There is no doubt, Lena Neudauer is a strong personality and technically brilliant interpreter, who works entirely in the spirit of the composer and his work” (Pizzicato, 2020).
In the realm of chamber music, she collaborates intensively with Julian Steckel, Julia Fischer, Matthias Kirschnereit, Herbert Schuch, Lauma Skride, William Youn, and Nils Mönkemeyer. Projects involving gut strings with Tobias Koch showcase Lena Neudauer as a versatile chamber musician. Since her ensemble debut in 2023 at the Heidelberger Frühling, Lena Neudauer has regularly performed in a trio with Marianna Shirinyan and Sebastian Klinger. In a soloist quintet with Silke Avenhaus, Wen Xiao Zheng, Sebastian Klinger, and Rick Stoijn, Lena Neudauer engages in special projects. For instance, Schubert’s Trout Quintet was performed in combination with the new composition “A Trout Pond” (a collaborative work by Ferran Cruixent, Osmo Tapio Räihälä, Gerald Resch, Johannes Schachtner, and Dejan Lazic). This project was supported by the NRW Cultural Secretariat and released as a CD by CAvi. For the 2025/26 season, the ensemble will once again receive support from the NRW Cultural Secretariat for their project “Take 5”.
Lena Neudauer has performed with orchestras such as the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken/Kaiserslautern, the MDR Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the Kammerakademie Potsdam, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the Orchestre National de Belgique, the Orchestre de chambre de Paris, the Russian Philharmonic St. Petersburg, the Bern Symphony Orchestra, the Collegium Musicum Basel, and the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, collaborating with conductors such as Dennis Russell Davies, Mariss Jansons, Hannu Lintu, Mario Venzago, Wojciech Rajski, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Bruno Weil, Marcus Bosch, Howard Griffiths, Christoph Poppen, Ari Rasilainen, Juri Gilbo, Antonello Manacorda, Andreas Spering, Dirk Kaftan, Daniel Cohen, Nabil Sheheta, and Pablo Gonzalez. Since 2018, she has had an intensive collaboration with the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn, involving premieres, play-conduct projects, concert tours, and a planned CD recording. Lena Neudauer performs on a Lorenzo Guadagnini from 1743 and a Philipp Augustin from 2015.