Life
About
Alma Deutscher is a 17 year-old British composer, pianist, and violinist born in Basingstoke, United Kingdom, in 2005. She started playing the piano when she was two years old and the violin when she was three. Deutscher received the European Culture Prize in a ceremony at the Vienna State Opera (2019), and has been elected by the German Magazine Stern in 2019 as one of twelve ‘Heroes of Tomorrow’. In December 2019, Alma Deutscher made her debut in Carnegie Hall. She has appeared as a soloist playing her own compositions with orchestras such as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Mozarteum Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra.
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Deutscher could sing in perfect pitch before she could speak, and she could read music before she could read words. Her melodies sometimes even come to her in her dreams. She was educated at home until the age of 16, and her early musical education focused on creative improvisation, following a method of teaching called Partimenti, which was developed in eighteenth-century Italy, and which has been revived and popularized by her teacher Professor Robert Gjerdingen.
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In 2018, Deutscher moved with her family to Vienna, which she has described as her "musical homeland". In 2021, she was admitted to the conducting degree at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, to study with conductor Johannes Wildner. Deutscher may be the youngest student ever to be admitted to this conducting course.
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Alma Deutscher plays on a violin made in 1683 by Antonio Stradivari (the Bucher Stradivarius), and on a violin made by Peter Greiner in 2015.