Anthea Kreston
Violinist Anthea Kreston sometimes just needs to pinch herself. How did she get so lucky? She was the first American violinist to be a member of a major European string quartet, Germany’s Artemis Quartet – and she travelled the world, performing on some of the most legendary stages a person could dream of, from Carnegie Hall to London’s Wigmore – from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam to Seoul. She loves to write – penning a classical music blog on the London-based Slipped Disc which was one of the top-5 most read music blogs internationally, as well as founding and curating the Fortnightly Music Book Club.
She was a Professor at the Universität der Kunste Berlin, where Clara Schumann and Bruch taught, a Master Teacher at the Queen Elizabeth Chapel in Brussels, and teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her mentors include Ida Kavafian, the Emerson Quartet and Isaac Stern. She toured for years with Yo-Yo Ma as a part of his Silk Road Project, landing in places as exotic as Las Vegas and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and everywhere in between.
She is the executive and artistic director of Majestic Chamber Music Series as well as Inside Music Academy, a ground-breaking virtual music school. As a recording artist for Warner Classics, she has received both the Echo Award, Europe’s Grammy Award, and the Diapason D’Or, France’s highest award from music critics. She has hosted her own podcast from the Boulez Hall in the heart of East Berlin and has played in the Berlin Philharmonic, and as concertmaster of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. But most of all, she loves being with her family – two hilarious and generous daughters and a super-duper husband, growing tomatoes, and petting guinea pigs.
The San Diego Reader said of her “… Anthea is a soloist of the Heifetz-Shaham-Vengerov caliber, whose musical instincts could make even a mere bagatelle thrill the soul and stir the senses to a frenzy.”