Viola de Hoog, Marten Root & Mikayel Balyan
Biography Viola de Hoog, Marten Root & Mikayel Balyan
Viola de Hoog
is a versatile musician whose distinguished international career has predominantly been focused on historically-informed performance. For twenty of those years she also travelled the world as the cellist in the renowned Dutch Schönberg Quartet.
After completing her studies at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam with Anner Bijlsma, she concentrated on performing chamber music, playing both modern and baroque cellos. In 1986 she was a finalist at the First International Concours for baroque cello in Paris.
For many years Viola de Hoog was principal cello with Anima Eterna, a position she has also held with Tafelmusik Toronto, the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, English Baroque Soloists, the Baroque Orchestra of the Netherlands Bach Society and Concerto Köln: she currently is principal cello with the Kölner Akademie, Nieuwe Philharmonie Utrecht and The King’s Consort.
The repertoire of her chamber music ensembles, Schönberg Quartet and Ensemble Schönbrunn (www.chambermusic.nl), spans from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries and has generated, between the two ensembles, an impressive discography. Ensemble Schönbrunn has released fifteen CDs, of which worthy of particular mention, alongside works by Bach, Haydn and Mozart, is the series Out of the Shadow of the Masters on the Globe label, with rediscovered compositions of Beethoven’s contemporaries such as Friedrich Hartmann Graf, Anton Reicha, Ferdinand Ries and Johann Martin Nisle. The Schönberg Quartet recorded thirty-five CDs, including the complete works for strings of Schönberg, Berg, Webern and Zemlinsky (Chandos). The friends of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles awarded the quartet its Honorary Life Membership, an honour that had only previously been accorded to artists such as Felix Galimir, Eugene Lehner and Pierre Boulez. In 2009 – the Schönberg Quartet’s final year – Viola de Hoog founded the Narratio Quartet for the performance of Beethoven’s string quartets on period instruments. Its début concerts, featuring the five late quartets of Beethoven at the Early Music Festival in Utrecht, were a resounding success.
Viola de Hoog has performed Bach’s six cello suites widely, including in Japan, Amsterdam and Paris. She teaches baroque cello and chamber music at the conservatories of Amsterdam, Utrecht and Bremen, where she was recently distinguished with the position of honorary professor.
Viola de Hoog plays a highly prized cello made by Giovanni Battista Guadagnini, Milano, c.1750, loaned from the collection of the Dutch Musical Instruments Foundation.
