Rebecca Fischer Violin

Praised for her “beautiful tone and nuanced phrasing” (Boston Musical Intelligencer), violinist Rebecca Fischer is sought after as a highly expressive, intuitive performer. As the first-violinist for 18 years with the Chiara Quartet, she toured, recorded the complete string quartets of Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók and Jefferson Friedman (a Grammy-nominated album), premiered numerous works by composers such as Philip Glass and Gabriela Lena Frank, and held residencies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harvard University. Performance highlights with the Chiara Quartet include the complete Bartók quartets by heart at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, several complete Beethoven quartet cycles, and collaborations with such artists as the Juilliard and Saint Lawrence quartets, Roger Tapping, Robert Levin, and the electronic duo Matmos.

Rebecca is the concertmaster of Baroklyn, an ensemble directed by pianist Simone Dinnerstein, whose first CD Complicité was released in May 2025, and she is a core member of the East Coast Chamber Orchestra. She has premiered solo works by composers Lisa Bielawa, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, Paola Prestini, Mathew Fuerst, Augusta Reed Thomas and Byron Au Yong, among others. As one half of The Afield, a multidisciplinary collaboration with artist Anthony Hawley combining new and original compositions for violin and voice with video and other media, Rebecca has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Atlanta Contemporary Museum, and the Harare International Festival of the Arts in Zimbabwe. 

Rebecca is the Executive Director and Director of Senior Greenwood Music Camp, a chamber music camp for high school aged musicians in western Massachusetts. She is Violin and Chamber Music Faculty at the Mannes School of Music, where she also serves as String Department Co-chair. She has given masterclasses and run workshops at Carnegie Hall, the Eastman School, The Juilliard School, Rice University, Seoul National University, the University of Michigan, and San Francisco Conservatory, among others, and she served for over a decade on the faculty of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Rebecca holds degrees from Columbia University (BA) and The Juilliard School (MM, AD), and her major teachers include Kathleen Winkler, Joel Smirnoff, Masao Kawasaki and members of the Juilliard, Cleveland, Concord and Takács quartets. Her book of personal essays The Sound of Memory: Themes from a Violinist’s Life was released in 2022. The “intimate and vulnerable” (Strings Magazine) collection has been featured on WNYC. Rebecca lives in New York City with her family and two cats, Stevie and Zepp.

Photos by Ben Semisch