Sonia Wieder-Atherton

Sonia Wieder-Atherton : Cellist, interpreter of a very broad repertoire reflecting her imaginative world, a designer of projects, and a musician sought after by many contemporary composers, Sonia Wieder-Atherton occupies a special place on today's musical scene.

She has played as soloist with the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre National de France, the Belgian National Orchestra, the Liege Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic, the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Lisbon, the Luxemburg Philharmonic Orchestra, the orchestra of the NDR in Hanover....
Pascal Dusapin, Georges Aperghis and Wolfgang Rihm have written numerous works for her.

She regularly plays with pianists Imogen Cooper, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Laurent Cabasso, Georges Pludermacher, Bruno Fontaine and violinists Raphaël Oleg, Jan Talich and Sylvia Marcovici, the Accentus choir and percussionist Françoise Rivalland.

She has been invited to perform her projects, of which she has overseen both the conception and the staging, in numerous festivals and in venues such as the Cité de la Musique, the Théâtre de la Ville, Musica à Strasbourg (France), the Bath Music Festival and the Cheltenham festival (GB), the Houston Opera (USA), the Dortmund Opera (Germany), Crossing the Line Festival (USA), Printemps de Bourges (France), Spoleto and Caserta Festivals (Italy).
Today her staged concerts are very much in demand in France and abroad : Beginning with Monteverdi, a concert which interweaves in a highly original manner Monteverdi duets and Giacinto Scelsi solo cello trilogy, Songs from Slavic Lands: a concert for cello and chamber orchestra ranging from Russia to Mittel Europa, and D'Est en musique, a visual concert performed with images from Chantal Akerman.

She recently founded her own Ensemble, Ensemble Niguna with which she presents some of her programmes.

Her numerous recordings bear witness to the development of her career: Beginning with Monteverdi, Schubert Trios, En sonate, Pascal Dusapin's cello Concerto, En concerto (with the Sinfonia Varsovia conducted by the late Janos Fürst, works by Ravel, Bartok and Shostakovitch). In 2009 she signed an exclusive recording contract with Naïve. The re-edition of her now famous Jewish Songs for cello and piano which gives us the opportunity to discover some texts written by Sonia Wieder-Atherton: 14 stories where she asks about time, memory and transmission.

Recognizing in Sonia Wieder-Atherton one of the most dynamic musical personalities of our era, the French Académie des Beaux-Arts bestowed on her the Grand Prix Del Duca de l'Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1999. Arte devoted several episodes of the television series Maestro to Sonia Wieder-Atherton.
After graduation from the Paris Conservatory under Maurice Gendron and classes with Rostropovitch, she left for Moscow and two years of study with Natalia Chakhovskaia at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. In 1986, shortly after her return, she was laureate of the Rostropovitch Competition.