Renate Eggebrecht (born August 12, 1944) is a German violinist and record producer.
Born in Selent, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, Eggebrecht received her initial musical training from her mother, starting at the age of four. At the age of seven she became a pupil of Hans Hilf, who had studied in the master class of Walther Davisson at the Leipzig Conservatory. From the age of twelve Renate Eggebrecht studied violin with Friedrich Wührer and piano with Wilhelm Rau at the Lübeck College of Music. She continued her training at the Munich College of Music. Subsequently she devoted herself to private studies, attending master classes with Max Rostal, Seymion Snitkovsky and chamber music courses with the LaSalle Quartet.
In 1986 Renate Eggebrecht founded the Fanny Mendelssohn Quartet with which she gave the premiere in Munich of Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel’s Piano Quartet in A-flat Major (1822) and String Quartet in E-flat Major (1834). In 1988 she published the first editions of these chamber music works (Furore Verlag, Kassel), also producing the world-premiere CD, recorded by her ensemble, in a co-production with the Bavarian Radio.
In order to publicize unknown and forgotten music, Renate Eggebrecht founded the music production firm of Troubadisc as a label for Classical music in 1991. For this label she made world premiere CD recordings of chamber music by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Ethel Smyth, Germaine Tailleferre, Grażyna Bacewicz and other women composers.
In 1993 Renate Eggebrecht produced the complete songs of the French composer and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, their first release on CD, and similarly the instrumental and piano songs of Ethel Smyth in 1997. Besides Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel’s chamber music, Eggebrecht also produced the composer’s songs in 2001, and in 1998, with the pianist Wolfram Lorenzen, the piano cycle Das Jahr ("The Year") based on the composer’s fair copy as a CD world premiere.
With her ensemble, Eggebrecht recorded Darius Milhaud’s String Quartets nos. 1-8 for CD in 1994-5, as well as his works Machine agricoles op. 56 and Catalogue de Fleurs op. 60, all for the Troubadisc label. This label also issued CD recordings by the Fanny Mendelssohn Quartet of the two large string quartets by Arthur Bliss in 1996.
In 1997, together with the German pianist Wolfram Lorenzen, Eggebrecht was able to present the CD recordings, in three volumes, of Edition Max Reger’s Piano Chamber Music. She subsequently devoted herself to recording Max Reger’s complete works for violin solo, which she presented in 2003 as a production of the Troubadisc label, a first in the history of recorded sound. As a whole, this five-CD edition of Max Reger’s complete works for violin solo, ranging from op. 42 (1899) to op. 131a and posthumous works (1916), is a world premiere.
Eggebrecht has contributed greatly as a chamber musician to the discovery of worthwhile music by neglected composers. In 2000 she issued, together with the cellist Friedemann Kupsa, the world premiere recording of the Sonata for violin and violoncello (1947) by the Greek Schoenberg pupil Nikos Skalkottas, and the Sonatina op. 324 by Darius Milhaud. With Friedemann Kupsa she presented in 2002 the world premiere of the Duo-Sonata (1985) by the Romanian avant-garde composer Anatol Vieru and the Strassenmusik No 16, op. 210 (2001) by the Greek composer Dimitri Nicolau. The latter work is dedicated to the Duo Eggebrecht/Kupsa.
Her experience with the music of the twentieth century in the area of chamber music provided Renate Eggebrecht with excellent prerequisites for dealing with the new expressive possibilities of the violin as a solo instrument. In order to make available to the listening public the compositions for violin alone that were written from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day, the violinist and producer Renate Eggebrecht initiated the edition "Violin Solo" in 2002; volume 1 included the world premiere recording of the Sonata op. 61 by Johanna Senfter, a pupil of Max Reger.
In 2006 Troubadisc released the second album of this series with the violinist Renate Eggebrecht, this time with two world premieres: the Sonatina op. 383 by Darius Milhaud, and the Sonata in Greek Mood, op. 228 (2002) by Dimitri Nicolau. The latter work is dedicated to Renate Eggebrecht.
In 2007 the third album released with the complete recording of the works for violin solo (1916–1925) by Paul Hindemith together with the world premiere recordings of the Capriccio (1997) by Anatol Vieru and the Partita (1976) by the Russian minimalist Vladimir Martynov.
In 2008 Renate Eggebrecht released the fourth album of the series "Violin Solo" with the Suite No.1 and No.2 (1958) by Ernest Bloch, the "Élégie" (1944) by Igor Stravinsky, the "Four Caprices" (1968) by Grażyna Bacewicz, the "Sonata-Monologue" (1975) by Aram Khachaturian and the work "a paganini" (1982) by Alfred Schnittke for Troubadisc.
In 2010 the violinist released the fifth solo album with recordings of the Sonata op. 115 (1947) by Sergey Prokofiev, the ‘Sonata fantasia’(1928/29) by Ljubica Marić, the Caprice No. 1 (1949)and the world premiere recordings of the Caprice No. 2 (1952) and the Sonata (1941) by Grażyna Bacewicz, also the Sonata (1962) and the Suite of Estonian Dance Tunes for solo violin (1978) by Eduard Tubin and the world premiere recording of the Sonata (1978) by Edison Denisov. Renate Eggebrecht presents therewith the complete recording of the works for Solo Violin by Grażyna Bacewicz.
With the fifth SACD, a sequence of works, beginning with Max Reger’s Chaconne op. 117, no. 4 (1909) and extending to the present day, already becomes evident. A compendium of the modern violin literature is presented with violin sonatas by the German Johanna Senfter, the Czech Erwin Schulhoff, the Frenchman Darius Milhaud, the Swiss Arthur Honegger, the Hungarian Béla Bartók, the Greek Nikos Skalkottas, the Pole Grażyna Bacewicz, the Greek-Italian Dimitri Nicolau the German Paul Hindemith, as well as solo works by the Romanian Anatol Vieru and the Russians Vladimir Martynov, Igor Stravinsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, the American Ernest Bloch and the Armenian Aram Khachaturian, the Serbian Ljubica Marić, as well as the Estonian Eduard Tubin.
Renate Eggebrecht’s violin is a Stradivarius copy by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume from 1858; her favorite bow is by Jules Fétique.
Read more about Renate Eggebrecht: Discography