An exchange of ideas and communication play an extremely important role for Maja Weber not only in music but in her private life as well. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that chamber music is at the heart of her work as a musician.

Maja Weber was born into a family of musicians in 1974 and was four when she started to play the violoncello. Even though it was not she who chose the instrument, she never for a moment questioned this decision. From the very outset it went without saying that her passion for the violoncello would influence the course that her career would take.

Maja Weber began her formal training with Markus Stocker and Cäcilia Chmel at the Winterthur Academy of Music, later moving to Cologne, where she studied the violoncello with Frans Helmerson and chamber music with the Alban Berg Quartet at the city’s University of Music and Dance. She has also received advice and encouragement from a number of leading musicians, including Isaac Stern, Walter Levin, Paul Katz and Valentin Berlinsky. During this period she and the ensembles in which she was playing took part in string quartet competitions that were a valuable opportunity for her to develop as an artist and an important way for her to prepare for her future professional life. Among her many awards and successes have been second prizes in Geneva and Graz, a Millennium Award in London and first prizes in Cremona and Bubenreuth.

Maja Weber was still very young when she discovered her love of chamber music while making music at home within her family circle. While still at school she and her sister formed a string quartet which under the name of the Amar Quartet became a successful professional ensemble in 1995.

Since 1992 Maja Weber has been a member of the Zurich Ars Amata Chamber Ensemble that her parents, Elisabeth and Rudolf Weber-Erb, founded in 1974.

Maja Weber formed the StradivariQuartet in 2007. Until 2019 its members all performed on instruments made by the legendary violin maker from Cremona. It is now one of the leading string quartets in Switzerland, appearing nationally and internationally in leading venues and at prestigious festivals.

In 2014 Maja Weber and Per Lundberg, her chamber partner of many years’ standing, additionally formed the DuoLeonore. Its name represents an act of homage to Beethoven and to the German composer’s significance for the repertory for violoncello and piano.

In the course of her career Maja Weber has devoted herself with increasing commitment to the conception and realization of unconventional programmes that she performs at individual recitals or in a series of such recitals. The result of this artistic and entrepreneurial initiative is numerous festivals and tours that have lasted several days and taken her to concert venues in Switzerland and abroad, including Stradivari’s home town of Cremona as well as Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna.

Maja Weber has also organized annual series of concerts such as Winter Sounds on Lake Zurich. Focusing on a single composer, she has pursued this aim for a number of years both as a violoncellist and as an artistic director. Her passion for exploring the compositional nuances that may be found in the works she performs and her desire to immerse herself intensively in a particular musical language have left their mark on all her recitals, no matter the forces involved, as well as on their programmatical conception.

Sound recordings form a constant in Maja Weber’s work as a musician. Here, too, she focuses on individual composers. In addition to live relays and radio broadcasts, she has to date released more than twenty CDs, which she has made with the Stradivari Quartet, the Amar Quartet, the Ars Amata of Zurich, with DuoLeonore and also with other musicians with whom she is friendly. Her CD of Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello is her first solo album.

Between 1999 and 2019 Maja Weber performed on the Bonamy Dobrée–Suggia Violoncello from 1717. Made by Antonio Stradivari, it was loaned to her by the Stradivari Foundation of Habisreutinger. The present recording of Bach’s Solo Suites represents Maja Weber’s farewell to an instrument that has accompanied her on her successful career throughout the last twenty years.