Daniel Hope

Durban-born and London-raised, Daniel Hope came up through the Yehudi Menuhin School and the Royal Academy of Music, where Zakhar Bron taught him; Menuhin himself became first a mentor and later a musical partner. From 2002 he was the violinist of the Beaux Arts Trio, its youngest member and its last, playing more than four hundred concerts across the ensemble's final six seasons until it disbanded in 2008. His albums and commissions reach into film, folk, early music and the history of exile. Max Richter's Recomposed: Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which he premiered and recorded, charted in more than twenty countries. He has recorded exclusively for Deutsche Grammophon since 2007, and has collected the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis, a Diapason d'Or de l'Année and an Edison. He has been music director of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra since 2016 and of the New Century Chamber Orchestra in San Francisco since 2018, artistic director at the Frauenkirche in Dresden since 2019, president of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn since 2020, and from November 2025 intendant of the Menuhin Festival Gstaad. He plays the 1742 Guarneri del Gesù known as the ex-Lipiński. Born in 1973 to the writer Christopher Hope, he was six months old when the family left South Africa; his mother worked as Yehudi Menuhin's secretary, his first lessons were with Sheila Nelson, and at eleven Menuhin invited him to play a Bartók duo on German television. Their partnership ran to more than sixty concerts and closed with Menuhin's last appearance in 1999, conducting Hope in Schnittke's violin concerto. He has commissioned new works and was in close contact with Schnittke, Takemitsu, Birtwistle, Gubaidulina, Kurtág and Maxwell Davies, and the European Cultural Prize for Music came to him in 2015.