Artists

Biography:

Lauded for ‘delicate yet virtuosic’ playing (BBC Music Magazine) and ‘seamless subtleties of tone colour’ with ‘plenty of edge’ (The Strad) , Swiss-French-German cellist Christoph Croisé is quickly building an international reputation as one of the most captivating young concert soloists to emerge in recent years.

At the age of 17, he made his New York debut at Carnegie Hall and has since performed in many more of the world’s renowned concert halls, among them the Tonhalle Zürich, the Berliner Philharmonie, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Vienna Konzerthaus and the Baku State Philharmonic Hall.

As a soloist, Croisé has appeared under the batons of conductors such as Michael Sanderling, Mario Venzago, Ayyub Guliyev, Alf Årdal, Maurizio Dones, Giovanni Bria and Dimitris Botinis, with various orchestras including Musikkollegium Winterthur, St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, Bern Symphony Orchestra, Azerbaijan State Symphony Orchestra, Camerata Switzerland, the Moravská filharmonie Olomouc, Südwestdeutsche Philharmonie Konstanz, Sichuan Symphony Orchestra,  ̇Izmir State Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Michoacán, Harbin Symphony Orchestra and South Czech Philharmonic. Several of his concerts have been broadcast live on radio and television by Bavarian Radio, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, WQXR, BBC, RTS and WFMT, among other outlets.

He is a regular guest at prestigious festivals including the Musical Olympus Festival in St Petersburg, New York and Baku, the Lucerne Festival, Radio France Festival Montpellier, Menuhin Festival Gstaad, Salzkammergut Festwochen Gmunden and Festival International de Musique de Wissembourg.

As a chamber musician he has performed with Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Mayuko Kamio, Bartek Niziol, Isabelle van Keulen, Andrey Baranov, Sergey Ostrovsky, Kirill Troussov, Alexander Zemtsov, Oxana Shevchenko and Alexander Panfilov, among many others.

Croisé has taken first prize in a number of competitions, among them the Schoenfeld International String Competition (Harbin, 2016), the 2nd Berliner International Music Competition 2018 (First Grand Prize), the ‘Salieri-Zinetti’ International Chamber Music Competition (Verona, 2016) and the Migros-Kulturprozent (Zurich, 2015 and 2016), as well as Gold Medal with honours at the first Berliner International Music Competition (2017).

His debut album with Oxana Shevchenko was released in May 2015 on Quartz Classics, his second album, Summer Night, including Othmar Schoeck’s Cello Concerto, was released in February 2018 on GENUIN classics, and his third album (Haydn, Vivaldi Cello Concertos) was released in March 2019 on AVIE Records, winning the Supersonic Award from Pizzicato Magazine and the ‘Clef d’or’ for the best concerto album of 2019 from ResMusica Magazine. More releases on AVIE followed: The Russian Album with pianist Alexander Panfilov (November 2019), The Solo Album (August 2021, Presto Music ‘Editor’s Choice’) and Joachim Raff – Complete Works for Cello and Piano (February 2022, with Oxana Shevchenko).

Croisé is often involved in baroque projects as a complement to modern performance. He has worked extensively in the field, performing as soloist with Il Pomo d’Oro and working with Maurice Steger and Nicolas Altstaedt. In 2020 and 2021 he released an album and video of the complete set of Viola da Gamba Sonatas and six Cello Suites by J.S. Bach, performing on a 1720 Guarneri ‘filius Andreae’ baroque cello.

In addition to performing, he has given international masterclasses in prestigious venues around the world and composes his own pieces from baroque and classical to jazz and electronic music.

Croisé began playing the cello at the age of seven under the tutelage of Katharina Kühne. Since 2007, he has been studying with Alexander Neustroev and, as of 2013, with Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt at the Berlin University of the Arts. He has additionally benefited from major artistic advice from Steven Isserlis, Michael Sanderling, David Geringas, Walter Grimmer and Frans Helmerson.