Press:
Tales from the river bank ( the Strad April 2004)
At a large villa on the edge of the Rhine in Bonn, a coachload of students is disembarking. Instrument cases in hand, they traipse into the villa on their way to a long day of rehearsals and concerts that won't be over until the small hours. They are here for the String Academy of the Rhine, a biennial event started in 2002 Virginia-born violinist, Ida Bieler.
'Every school and music college caters for soloists, but chamber music always comes a poor second!' says Bieler, who has set out to do something about it. 'As a young student I was privileged to attend the Marlboro Festival — where I played Beethoven sonatas with Rudolf Serkin — and the Christinas String Seminars in New York. The admittedly unique atmosphere of those places inspired me two years ago to start the academy.'
Based in Germany for over 20 years, Bieler was leader of the Gürzenich Orchestra, Cologne, (only the second woman to hold a similar chair in Germany) during the 1980s before joining the Melos Quartet of Stuttgart as second violin in 1993. At the same time she became a professor at Düsseldorf's Robert Schumann Hochschule. An indefatigably active presence in the region, Bieler has managed to secure logistic and financial help from the regional government and Borin's European Music Academy. ... (complete article)