Renaud Capuçon

Renaud Capuçon stands among France’s leading violinists, maintaining a broad repertory that embraces both contemporary scores and core works from the French and German traditions. He figures as a prominent artist on the Erato roster.

Born in Chambéry in the French Alps on January 27, 1976, he began lessons at the regional conservatory at the age of four. His brother, cellist Gautier Capuçon, has joined him for performances and recordings, among them the Brahms Double Concerto in A minor, Op. 102. At fourteen he enrolled at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP), where he trained with Gérard Poulet and Veda Reynolds and earned the institution’s highest honors in both violin and chamber music. He later worked with Isaac Stern and has appeared in concert using Stern’s Guarneri del Gesù instrument. In 1996 he launched the Rencontres artistiques de Bel-Air festival in La Ravoire near Chambéry, directing it until 2010; six years afterward he inaugurated a new Easter festival in Aix-en-Provence.

Named concertmaster of the European Youth Orchestra under Claudio Abbado in 1997, he held the post for three seasons and, during that period, began his discography with a 1999 Virgin Classics release devoted to Schubert works for violin and piano. The early 2000s brought wider recognition on both the stage and in the studio. While French repertoire by Franck, Ravel, and Dutilleux remains central to his programs, he moves with equal assurance through German literature from Beethoven to Brahms. Additional interests extend to Kodály, Halvorsen, and Erwin Schulhoff, together with recent pieces such as Éric Tanguy’s 2002 Sonata for violin and cello and the 2015 violin concerto he commissioned from Wolfgang Rihm.

Capuçon has appeared with leading ensembles including the Berlin Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony, and he maintains an active chamber-music schedule alongside pianists such as Nicholas Angelich, Martha Argerich, and Hélène Grimaud. Roughly seventy recordings, issued chiefly on the affiliated Virgin Classics and Erato labels, document his work; these include a complete set of Beethoven’s violin sonatas with Frank Braley. Three further albums appeared in 2021: Elgar’s Violin Concerto in B minor, Op. 61, recorded with Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra; a collection of chamber pieces by Michael Jarrell; and Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, which he conducted with the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne. A pair of releases followed in 2022 and three more in 2023, among them a cycle of Mozart’s violin concertos issued on Deutsche Grammophon and again led by Capuçon with the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne. In 2024 he returned to Erato with Les Choses de la Vie: Cinema II, his second anthology of film themes.