Julia Hagen

Five years old at her first cello lesson, Julia Hagen was born in Salzburg in 1995 and passed through a sequence of teachers — Enrico Bronzi, Reinhard Latzko, Heinrich Schiff, Jens Peter Maintz — before completing her studies at the Kronberg Academy with Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt. She plays concertos with European orchestras and keeps a chamber life running beside them, with Igor Levit, Renaud Capuçon and András Schiff among her partners. The UBS Young Artist Award came in 2024, as did an appearance with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Lucerne Festival; her first record, the Brahms sonatas, was made with the pianist Annika Treutler. She has played in Bulgaria Hall. She was fourteen when she first played a concerto, with the Vienna Jeunesse Orchestra, and her studies ran through the Salzburg Mozarteum, the university in Vienna and the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Prizes came from the cello competitions in Liezen and the Mazzacurati, and the Verbier Festival Academy gave her its Nicolas Firmenich Prize; the Brahms sonatas with Annika Treutler were released by Hänssler Classic in 2019. She has played with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, the Mozarteumorchester, the Bruckner Orchester Linz and Kremerata Baltica, in halls including the Wiener Musikverein, the Barbican and Suntory Hall, and her cello was made by Francesco Ruggieri in Cremona in 1684. In autumn 2025 she became a professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.