Fiona Stevens is passionate about Historically Informed Performance.
At the age of 16 she was lucky enough to be allowed to practise Bach on the school harpsichord, and began to realise how different music might sound if played on the instrument for which it was intended. Aged 18 she grasped her first opportunity to learn the baroque violin and never looked back.
She studied musicology at Trinity College Cambridge, violin in Düsseldorf and Historically Informed Performance in Frankfurt am Main and Den Haag. During her career as a professional violinist, she worked regularly with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Jos van Immerseel, Rüdiger Lotter and Andreas Spering, and concert performances took her to major concert halls in Europe and the USA.
She has coached the Bremer Philharmoniker in Historically Informed Performance and worked with students from the Hochschule für Musik in Bremen, the Universität der Künste in Berlin and the University of Southampton, UK. For two years she ran an arts agency that experimented in cultural crossover, promoting concerts in venues and conditions that are unlikely for classical music. In her own chamber music concerts she likes to share the emotional reasons for being a musician with her audience because she believes that this makes the music more accessible for her listeners.
She is convinced that music can change society for the better and completed a PhD on that subject at the University of Southampton, UK, in 2017.
Together with Dr. Sarah Hubrich she pioneered the experimental module “Zukunftsmusik” at the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf from 2018-2019 and she currently holds a lectureship for the module “Zukunftsmusik. A novel music education concept” in the department of Social Work at the University of Applied Science in Darmstadt, Germany.
In February 2022 she accepted a position as chief executive of Concerto Köln, one of Germany’s three internationally acclaimed orchestras for Historically Informed Performance.