Thomas Meining

The violinist and Kammervirtuose Thomas Meining graduated from Dresden’s Special School of Music before studying under Annemarie Dietze at the city’s Carl Maria von Weber College of Music. During this time he also attended numerous masterclasses by internationally renowned violinists such as Wolfgang Marschner and Václav Snítil. Thomas Meining was a prizewinner at national and international youth competitions. In 1985, at the age of twenty-two, he joined the ranks of the Staatskapelle Dresden. Only two years later he became the orchestra’s assistant first concertmaster. As concertmaster of the Musica Viva Ensemble Dresden, to which he has belonged for twenty years, and as the first violinist of the Dresden String Quartet, Thomas Meining has dedicated himself to the performance of contemporary music and the chamber repertoire. He began these activities directly upon taking up his orchestral duties with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

In 1999 he was awarded the Fritz Busch Prize of the Dresden Semperoper. Thomas Meining has appeared as a soloist with the Staatskapelle and has performed on multiple occasions with the Hamburg State Opera Orchestra, the Elbland Philharmonic Orchestra, the Dresden Chamber Orchestra and the Cypriot State Orchestra Nicosia. Concert tours as a soloist and chamber musician have taken him to various cities in Germany and to leading music festivals in Salzburg, Schleswig-Holstein, the Rheingau, Lugano and Warsaw. He has also made guest appearances in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Russia, China, Cyprus, Japan and the USA. As first concertmaster, Thomas Meining has been repeatedly invited to perform with the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra. He has also given master classes at the University of Fine Arts and Music in Tokyo. In January 2009 he gave the highly successful Dresden premiere of Ferruccio Busoni's Violin Concerto, composed in 1896 for the then concertmaster Henri Petri, together with the Staatskapelle Dresden.