Unusually versatile, violinist Ariadne Daskalakis has gained recognition in mainstream repertory, in historically minded Baroque performances, and contemporary music. Raised in the U.S. by Greek immigrant parents, she has been based in Germany for much of her professional career. Daskalakis was born in Boston on December 1, 1969. She began taking violin lessons early, attending the Winsor School while taking private lessons with Eric Rosenblith at Boston's New England Conservatory Preparatory School. Daskalakis attended the Juilliard School in New York, studying with Szymon Goldberg, and then moved to Berlin's College of the Arts, working with Ilan Gronich and Thomas Brandis. While following this demanding musical curriculum, she found time to complete a general B.A. degree at Harvard in 1993. By that time, she had already joined the Ensemble Oriol in Berlin, a small orchestra that played without a conductor; she became its concertmaster and played concertos with the group. She and other members of the group founded the Manon Quartet, with which she made several recordings. Daskalakis has performed with the Berlin Symphony, the English Chamber Orchestra, and the New Bedford Symphony, among others. On the historical-performance side, she has played with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, the Kölner Akademie, and the Norsk Barokkorchester. She is a co-founder of Ensemble Vintage Köln, a historical-performance group, and she has performed recitals with pianists Paolo Giacometti and Roglit Ishay. Daskalakis has given several major premieres: the world premiere of Caspar Johannes Walter's Zeichnungen at the Musica Viva Festival in Munich in 2004, the Vienna premiere of the violin-and-viola work Herr K und Frau N the following year, and the multimedia Vivaldi adaptation 4x4 in Berlin in 2011. She has often performed as leader-soloist with major European chamber groups, including the Stuttgart and Prague Chamber Orchestras. She has recorded obscure early Romantic-period works by such composers as Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda and Joachim Raff. Daskalakis is a professor of violin at the University of Music and Dance in Cologne. Her recording catalog is varied and includes albums on the Naxos, CPO, and BIS labels, among others; her 2015 recording on BIS of Biber's Rosary Sonatas was widely acclaimed. For BIS in 2019, with Giacometti, she began a series of historically oriented recordings of Schubert's violin-and-fortepiano music. ~ James Manheim