- Cello
Sonia Wieder-Atherton was born in San Francisco of a mother of Romanian origin and an American father. She grew up in New-York and then Paris, where she enrolled at the Conservatoire National Supérieur, studying with Maurice Gendron. She very soon found herself investigating form and sound, already seeking a language that could be a common denominator for all music. At 19 she crossed the iron curtain to live in Moscow, where she studied with Natalia Shakhovskaya at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. At 25, she won the Rostropovich Competition.
Sonia Wieder-Atherton works as tirelessly as she experiments. She enjoys nothing better than to decipher the language of contemporary composers like Pascal Dusapin, Georges Aperghis, and Wolfgang Rihm, all of whom she has been prompt to champion and who have written for her.
She performs as a soloist under the guidance of numerous conductors, notably: the Paris Orchestra, the French National Orchestra, the Belgian National Orchestra, the Liège Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonia, the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Luxembourg, the NDR Orchestra in Hanover, the REMIX Ensemble, Les Siècles, Asko/Schönberg… and works regularly with musicians like Imogen Cooper and Raphaël Oleg, with whom she records and performs in concert.
In 2011, she received the Bernheim Foundation Award, which each year acknowledges three creative works in the fields of the arts, literature and science.
She teaches at the Académie musicale de Villecroze in 1999.
Official website : http://soniawiederatherton.com