Benjamin Schmid is Professor of Violin at the Mozarteum University and was awarded the City of Salzburg's International Prize for Art and Culture in 2019. He gives masterclasses worldwide, was a professor and visiting professor at Bern University of the Arts, and serves as jury chair of the International Mozart Competition in Salzburg. As artistic director of the ClassixKempten music festival in Germany, he is responsible for a week of concerts in September that is popular with critics and audiences alike and focuses on first-rate concerts of lesser known chamber music and jazz.
Since his debut at the Salzburg Festival in 1986 as Sir Yehudi Menuhin’s solo partner, Benjamin Schmid has established himself as one of the leading violinists of his generation, appearing in around 3,000 concerts worldwide. His international breakthrough came in 1992 when he won the Carl Flesch Competition in London, where he was also awarded the Mozart, Beethoven and Audience Prizes.
He has since performed at major international venues with orchestras including the Vienna Philharmonic, the Philharmonia Orchestra London, the St Petersburg Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich. His repertoire extends far beyond the standard works to include violin concertos by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, Friedrich Gulda, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Edward Elgar, Kurt Weill, Henri Dutilleux and Mieczysław Weinberg, and he is also active as a jazz improviser.
A central focus of his artistic work is the music of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart. In addition to receiving the Mozart Prize at the Carl Flesch Competition, he has been awarded the Echo Klassik Prize, the Opus Klassik Prize and several prizes at the Swiss Radio SFR Interpreter Competition, each on the basis of Mozart performances. He has edited Mozart’s violin sonatas for Henle Verlag, premiered the reconstructed Fantasy in C minor for violin and piano with Robert Levin, and co-edited Leopold Mozart’s Neue Violinschule.
Benjamin Schmid has recorded more than 60 CDs, many of which have received major distinctions, including the Opus Klassik Prize, the German Record Critics’ Award (in both classical and jazz categories), the Echo Klassik Prize, Gramophone Editor’s Choice and The Strad Selection. Alongside the core concerto repertoire of Mozart, Beethoven, Bruch, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Wieniawski and Brahms, his recordings have contributed to the renewed appreciation of works by Korngold, Wolf-Ferrari, Weinberg, Gulda (including the Concerto for Violin and Cello), Ligeti, Paganini–Kreisler and Max Reger.
To mark his 50th birthday, OehmsClassics released the 20-CD box set Benjamin Schmid – Complete OehmsClassics Recordings. He has appeared repeatedly with the Vienna Philharmonic, including performances with Seiji Ozawa at the Salzburg Festival and with Valery Gergiev at the Summer Night Concert Schönbrunn; both concerts were broadcast worldwide and later released on CD and DVD. His life and artistic work have also been the subject of several documentary films.
Since the 2020/21 season, Benjamin Schmid has served as Artistic Director of the Chamber Orchestra Musica Vitae in Växjö, Sweden, shaping programmes that combine classical and jazz influences. He is also Artistic Director of the Salzburg Orchestra Soloists (SAOS), with a particular emphasis on 20th-century repertoire. He is featured in Jean-Michel Molkou’s reference volume The Great Violinists of the 20th Century (Buchet-Chastel, 2014).
He performs on the "ex Viotti 1718" Stradivarius violin, made available to him by the Austrian National Bank, as well as on a modern violin made in 2015 by Wiltrud Fauler.