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The Danish violinist, violin teacher and scholar, Anne-Marie Christensen, grew up on Bornholm - a small island in the Baltic Sea. Her mother always loved classical music and Anne Marie has very early memories of seeing the Wiener Philharmoniker on TV and going to chamber music concerts in the summer months when the local chamber music festival brought leading musicians to the island. When Anne Marie was 5 she started taking violin lessons at the local music school in a group with 3 other children. After the first year she went with her mother to spend a week at the summer school Strygere paa Mors. Here she encountered children not much older than her already aspiring to be professionals as well as performances by the teaching staff, many of whom were either concertmasters already or students at prestigious music schools such as the Julliard School of Music in New York. She continued to attend this summer school for 1 and later 2 weeks every summer until in her late teens, and these summer weeks spent practising and aspiring to perform at the highest level with daily lessons from leading string teachers were formative in making her want to pursue a career as a professional violinist. To prepare for entry to Music College she studied with Lars Bjornkjaer and Johannes Eskaer.
After finishing her school years Anne-Marie Christensen started her studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, where she studied with Professor Sergei Azizian and obtained her Performance Diploma in Violin Performance (1997-2003). Through most of her time as a student in Copenhagen her goal was to join the ranks as an orchestral musician upon graduation. However, her forte as a performer was always the Solo Sonatas and Partitas by J.S. Bach, and several friends began to encourage her to try the Baroque violin. Even so upon graduating Anne Marie spent some time as a free-lance violinist working on short term contracts with Danish orchestras and attending a number of auditions for permanent positions. It was while on such a contract that she received the offer to study with Professor Milan Vitek in Oberlin - and good colleagues encouraged her to grab this opportunity. Studying in Oberlin on the Historical Performance programme opened he eyes to not just a whole new repertoire but also to the discipline of musicology and the idea of academic study as a means to enrich performance. She continued her studies on modern violin with Professor Milan Vitek who encouraged her to pursue historical performance. She soon changed course to specialise in Baroque violin performance, earning her Master of Music degree in Music Performance (2005-2007). After finishing this she moved to London to study and gain further experience.
Since then Anne-Marie Christensen has co-founded Dei Gratia Baroque Ensemble and Due Corde (June 2010), performed with a range of other ensembles and recently finished her Ph.D. in Music performance, Music history, Social history at the Royal College of Music in London (2008-2018). Over the years she has also gained experience as a private violin teacher (since April 2011), taking on students of all ages from beginner to advanced. She has a particular passion for the string repertoire of the long 18th century and an interest in the connections in the history of the Arts (particularly the interactions between culture and society, which she explored in her Ph.D.). She enjoys exploring the depths of the cantatas of J.S. Bach, the galant style represented by Haydn, Boccherini and others, the fireworks of the Italian masters of the violin as well as folk-inspired repertoire and presenting these repertoires, both well known and forgotten, to audiences in concert or more informal settings.
Anne-Marie Christensen now enjoys a varied career of teaching and performing. Having finished her Ph.D. she hopes to perform more with her various ensembles. She has also recently been engaged to teach in schools in the Maidenhead area (through Berkshire Maestros) and as a teacher and string section coach at Camden Music Service's Saturday Centre. She enjoys the opportunity to share her love of music and the things she has learned from her teachers with all her students regardless of age or level of experience. She is also a returning tutor at HISS (Historically Informed Summer School) which is planned to return in August 2021. |
