Renate Eggebrecht

Biography

Born in Selent, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, Eggebrecht received her initial musical training from her mother, starting at the age of four. At the age of seven she became a pupil of Hans Hilf, who had studied in the master class of Walther Davisson at the Leipzig Conservatory. From the age of twelve Renate Eggebrecht studied violin with Friedrich Wührer and piano with Wilhelm Rau at the Lübeck College of Music. She continued her training at the Munich College of Music. Subsequently she devoted herself to private studies with Prof. Wolfram König, attending master classes with Max Rostal, Seymion Snitkovsky and chamber music courses with the LaSalle Quartet.

In 1986 Renate Eggebrecht founded the Fanny Mendelssohn Quartet with which she gave the World Premiere Performance of Fanny Hensel born Mendelssohn’s Piano Quartet in A-flat Major (1822) on March 6th 1988 in the Cultural Center Gasteig in Munich and the first Munich performance of the String Quartet in E-flat Major (1834) by this composer. In 1988 she published the first editions of these chamber music works (Furore Verlag, Kassel).

In order to publicize unknown and forgotten music, Renate Eggebrecht founded the music production firm of Troubadisc as a label for Classical music in 1991. For this label she made world premiere CD recordings of chamber music by Fanny Hensel born Mendelssohn, Ethel Smyth, Germaine Tailleferre, Grażyna Bacewicz and other women composers.

In 1993 Renate Eggebrecht produced the complete songs of the French composer and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, their first release on CD, and similarly the instrumental and piano songs of Ethel Smyth in 1997. Besides Fanny Hensel born Mendelssohn’s chamber music, Eggebrecht also produced the composer’s songs in 2001, and in 1998, with the pianist Wolfram Lorenzen, the piano cycle Das Jahr ("The Year") based on the composer’s fair copy as a CD world premiere.

With her ensemble, Eggebrecht recorded Darius Milhaud’s String Quartets nos. 1 - 8 for CD in 1994-5, as well as his works Machine agricoles op. 56 and Catalogue de Fleurs op. 60. In 1996 she issued also CD recordings by the Fanny Mendelssohn Quartet of the two large string quartets by Arthur Bliss .

In 1997, together with the German pianist Wolfram Lorenzen, Eggebrecht was able to present the CD recordings, in three volumes, of Edition Max Reger’s Piano Chamber Music. She subsequently devoted herself to recording Max Reger’s complete works for violin solo, which she presented in 2003.

Eggebrecht has contributed greatly as a chamber musician to the discovery of worthwhile music by neglected composers. In 2000 she issued, together with the cellist Friedemann Kupsa, the world premiere recording of the Sonata for violin and violoncello (1947) by the Greek Schoenberg pupil Nikos Skalkottas, and the Sonatina op. 324 by Darius Milhaud. With Friedemann Kupsa she presented in 2002 the world premiere of the Duo-Sonata (1985) by the Romanian avant-garde composer Anatol Vieru and the "Strassenmusik No 16", op. 210 (2001) by the Greek composer Dimitri Nicolau.

Her experience with the music of the twentieth century in the area of chamber music provided Renate Eggebrecht with excellent prerequisites for dealing with the new expressive possibilities of the violin as a solo instrument. In order to make available to the listening public the compositions for violin alone that were written from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day, the violinist Renate Eggebrecht initiated the edition "VIOLIN SOLO" in 2002. A sequence of works already becomes evident, beginning with Max Reger’s Chaconne op. 117, over Bach's Sei Solo and extending to the present day: A compendium of the modern violin literature.

Renate Eggebrecht’s violin is a Stradivarius copy by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume from 1858; her favorite bow is by Jules Fétique.

Discography

TROUBADISC Musicproduction [1]