Simone von Rahden

Biography:

Simone von Rahden enjoys a varied career as a chamber musician, soloist, orchestra musician and teacher.

Her parents both being piano teachers, Simone took her first musical steps at home and entered the local music school at the age of five, learning first violin, then viola with Dietmar Mantel. Here, the ground stone for her passion for chamber music and orchestral playing was laid; she later continued her studies with Wolfram Christ in Freiburg and with Tabea Zimmermann in Berlin, concluding her Konzertexamen (post-graduate) with highest honours in 2011.

Her first engagements took her to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra while still being a student; She has been a member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe since 2009 and was active with the Spira Mirabilis project 2007-2020. She has held principal positions at the Gran Teatre del Liceu Barcelona 2008-2009 and at the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment 2016-2021. Simone von Rahden has appeared as a soloist with the English Haydn Orchestra, the Philharmonie Südwestfalen, die WDR Sinfonieorchester and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, among others.

As a chamber musician she regularly performs throughout Europe, in recent years also increasingly with ensembles on historical instruments such as the Quartetto Bernardini and her string quintet “Spunicunifait”. Her most frequent chamber music partners include Kristian Bezuidenhout, Isabelle Faust, Stefan Hempel and Henja Semmler.

Since 2014, Simone von Rahden has been a viola teacher at the “Hanns Eisler” University of Music in Berlin and has also taught viola, orchestral studies, literature and chamber music at the hmt Rostock since October 2020 until she was appointed professor for string chamber music in October 2023 at the same institution.

She lives with her husband and son in Sanitz near Rostock, where she directs weekly musical encounters for children.