Julia Hagen . Lukas Sternath

When Julia Hagen plays the cello, she exudes naturalness and joy as if she’s doing it for the very first time. This uninterrupted love for her instrument was part of her birthright as Julia Hagen comes from a family of musicians in Salzburg: her grandfather was a leader of the Mozarteum Orchestra, her mother is a violist, her father is the world-class cellist and co-founder of the famous Hagen Quartet Clemens Hagen. So the footsteps in which Julia Hagen treads are big ones. But the young cellist, for whom study with Heinrich Schiff was particularly influential, has long since managed to go her own way. Her playing combines technical precision with lofty creative ambitions while playing with disarming spontaneity. At the Festspielhaus she appears on stage together with the Lukas Sternath who was declared ECHO Rising Star of the 2024/25 season in 2023. The former member of the Vienna Boys’ Choir can count such illustrious colleagues as Igor Levit, Till Fellner and Sir András Schiff among his teachers and mentors. His emotion-filled performances have delighted audiences in major concert halls such as the Musikverein in Vienna and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. For their concert programme, Julia Hagen and Lukas Sternath have selected a series of late Romantic and impressionist cello works by César Franck, Claude Debussy and Sergei Rachmaninoff.