Alma Deutscher

“She may be one of the most gifted musical talents of her generation, lauded by Zubin Mehta and Simon Rattle, but she is also a teenager testing the bounds of her freedom and pushing back against expectations. In Ms Deutscher’s case, this means defying her critics over her insistence that “music should be beautiful.” New York Times, June 2019

Alma Deutscher, born 2005, is a composer, violinist, pianist and conductor. She started playing the piano when she was two years old and the violin when she was three. At six, she composed her first piano sonata, and at nine a concerto for violin and orchestra. Conductor Zubin Mehta called her “one of the greatest musical talents today”. Sir Simon Rattle told the BBC: “Alma is a force of nature. I don’t know that I’ve come across anyone of that age with quite such an astonishing range of gifts. I haven’t really seen anything like it.” Composer Jörg Widmann said he had never met a talent like hers before. And violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter declared it was ""absolutely extraordinary what this young girl has managed to achieve.""

Alma Deutscher received the European Culture Prize in a ceremony at the Vienna State Opera (2019), and has been elected by the German Magazine Stern in 2019 as one of twelve ‘Heroes of Tomorrow’. In December 2019, Alma Deutscher made her debut in the sold out Carnegie Hall in New York, to repeated standing ovations. Her opera, Cinderella, has been performed on three continents to sold-out houses, and was described as “a once-in-a-lifetime opera-going event that had audiences standing and cheering”. More details on Cinderella here. The latest production (2022), conducted by Alma, is available on YouTube. Her first piano solo album, From My Book of Melodies, was released by Sony Classical and is published by G. Schirmer. She has also published an album for young pianists, Alma's Piano Songs.

As a soloist playing her own compositions, she has appeared in prestigious festivals such as the Lucerne Festival, Aix-en-Provence Festival, and Beijing Music Festival. She has appeared as soloist playing her own compositions with orchestras such as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Mozarteum Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra.

Alma has featured prominently in the international press, from major features and interviews in the most prominent newspapers around the world, from the New York Times, through most major newspapers in Europe, to the China Daily. She has also appeared in numerous television programs across the world. In 2017 she was the subject of an hour long BBC Documentary and a CBS 60 Minutes documentary.

Alma Deutscher plays on a violin made in 1683 by Antonio Stradivari (the Bucher Stradivarius, kindly loaned to her by a generous patron), and on a violin made by Peter Greiner in 2015.