Sonia Simmenauer Chair · (Germany) ← Back to list Concert Manager

Sonia Simmenauer was born in the USA and grew up in Paris. From 1982 to 2009 she lived in Hamburg, where she founded Impresariat Simmenauer in 1989 with the goal of creating an agency exclusively for string quartets. The Alban Berg Quartet, the Cleveland Quartet, the Guarneri Quartet and the Tokyo String Quartet are among the artists Simmenauer represented through their final days on stage. In 2009, Impresariat Simmenauer moved its offices to Berlin, and today represents a dozen internationally respected string quartets, among them the Arditti Quartet, the Artemis Quartet, the Belcea Quartet, the Quatuor Ebene, the Cuarteto Casals, the Jerusalem Quartet, the Quatuor Modigliani, the Schumann Quartett.

While the string quartet remains a large part of her work, Simmenauer signs also responsible for some very fine soloists such as violinists Isabelle Faust and Vadim Gluzman, cellists Jean-Guihen Queyras and Alisa Weilerstein, pianist Piotr Anderszewski, Alexander Melnikov, Elena Bashkirova and more.

Sonia Simmenauer wrote a widely received book about the life within a string quartet (Muss es Sein/ 2008) and has been named Professor at the Musikhochschule in Hamburg (2009) for a new field called: "Music Transmission".