About Guillaume Sutre

“Meticulous but inspired restraint highlights the luminous subtlety of Guillaume Sutre’s bow strokes, evoking here the playing of Szymon Goldberg and Arthur Grumiaux. The highest of compliments, in our eyes.” -Jean-Michel Molkhou Diapason, December 2015

Guillaume Sutre was only 18 years old when he won first prize in the Alberto Curci International Violin Competition in Naples, and the International Piano Trio ARD Competition in Munich. The list quickly fills out with a first prize at the European Chamber Music Competition FNAPEC (1989), first prize at the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition (USA 1990), winner of the Prix de la Fondation Charles Oulmont (1989), first prize at the Lily Laskine Competition (1991) and winner of the Prix Georges Enesco de la SACEM (1994). In 1999, he was named Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. 

Sutre was attracted to chamber music early in his career. In 1986, he founded the Trio Wanderer; ten years later he became the first violinist of the Ysaÿe Quartet, a post he held for almost twenty years until their farewell concert in 2014 in Paris’ Cité de la Musique. His vast repertoire of over 500 works features all the string chamber music of Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann and all 68 Haydn quartets. He has performed at many of the most prestigious venues around the world with such performers as Nelson Freire, Lynn Harrell, Gary Hoffman, Leonidas Kavakos, Yo-Yo Ma, Jean-Claude Pennetier, Michel Portal, Pascal Rogé and Sir Yehudi Menuhin. With his wife, Kyunghee Kim-Sutre, he formed a violin and harp duo, an ensemble through which they both continually explore and deepen their existing repertoire.

His recordings for Sony Classical, Decca, Harmonia Mundi, Naïve, Aeon, Ysaÿe Records, Hortus and Sonarti have received the highest distinctions in France and internationally. His live recording of the complete duets of Haydn and Mozart with violist Miguel da Silva has been hailed by critics as definitive, his CD featuring the quartets of A. Boucourechliev was awarded the Charles Cros Academy’s Grand Prix du Disque, and his two recent albums, J. Woelfl: The Paris Years (Sonarti) and Pensés Intimes (Hortus / WWI), received the 5 of Diapason.

Professor of a string quartet class at the Paris City Conservatory for ten years, since 2008 he has held the position of professor of violin and director of string chamber music at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music in Los Angeles. As of 2019, he will be part of the Tianjin Juilliard School of Music’s inaugural faculty. Sutre is passionately committed to imparting his knowledge upon musicians of younger generations. He regularly performs with his students, and in 2014 he co-produced the Calidore Quartet's debut CD. He regularly serves on juries of prestigious competitions, such as the Long-Thibaud International Violin Competition in Paris, the A. Postacchini International Violin Competition in Italy and the International String Quartet Competition in Bordeaux.

The year 2016 holds several important celebrations: the 25th anniversary of the Duo Sutre-Kim and the cultural year of Korea in France featuring a premiere of the commissioned work The Shadow of Arirang by Korean composer Paul Yeon Lee at the Festival des Grandes Heures in Saint-Emilion, France, and the October 2016 release of Duo Sutre-Kim’s CD (Sonarti) featuring Charles Bochsa and Rodolphe Kreutzer’s six Nocturnes Concertants for Harp and Violin.

Sutre began his studies in Douai, France; he then entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris at age 14 with Gérard Poulet and Jean-Claude Pennetier. After finishing his studies in France, he attended Indiana University at Bloomington to study with Josef Gingold, Franco Gulli, Menahem Pressler, and Janos Starker. He subsequently studied in Cologne with the Amadeus Quartet.

Sutre plays a violin made by Gregorio Antoniazzi, an enigmatic Venetian maker from the eighteenth century.

Program

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
String Quintet No. 2 in C minor, K. 406
IV. Allegro
Kexin Ye, Violin
Tzu-Yun Lin, Violin
Keunwoo Yoo, Viola
Somi Ko, Viola
Ernesto Cabezas, Cello

Johannes Brahms
Violin Sonata No. 1 in G major, Op. 78
I. Vivace ma non troppo
Yu Gong, Violin
Amy Chiu, Piano

Felix Mendelssohn
Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 66
I. Allegro energico e con fuoco
Kaiyuan Wu, Violin
Bowen Liu, Cello
Jinzhao Xu, Piano