Daniel Stepner, violin

Violinist Daniel Stepner is currently Artistic Director of the Aston Magna Festival and Foundation. Between 1987 and 2016, he was first violinist of the Lydian String Quartet at Brandeis, where he is Professor Emeritus, and still leads an annual workshop on the solo works of J.S. Bach.  For 24 years he was concertmaster of the Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra, and was also a founding member of the Boston Museum Trio, in residence at the Museum of Fine Arts. He was concertmaster of the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra for its first six biennial festivals, and in the 1980s he was assistant concertmaster and frequent soloist with Frans Brüggen’s Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, based in Holland.  For 20 years, he was a Preceptor in Music at Harvard University where, with Robert Levin, he team-taught a course in Chamber Music in Performance and Analysis.  He has taught at the New England Conservatory, the Eastman School, the Longy School, Oberlin College, at Brandeis and Harvard Universities, and in Boston’s STEP program.

Mr. Stepner has performed and recorded solo and chamber music from the early baroque through the early 21st century, and can be heard on numerous commercial CDs playing the music of Marais, Buxtehude, Rameau, J.S. Bach (including the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin), Vivaldi, Handel, Telemann, Haydn, Schubert, Brahms, as well as Bartok, Charles Ives (the complete Violin Sonatas with John Kirkpatrick and the String Quartets with the Lydian String Quartet), Paul Hindemith, Irving Fine, Vincent Persichetti, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Lee Hyla, Peter Child, John Harbison, Thomas Oboe Lee, Martin Boykan, Eugène Ysaÿe. He has also recorded the complete works for violin and piano by Yehudi Wyner (with Mr. Wyner at the piano)  as well as a number of his chamber works. Mr. Stepner studied at Northwestern University with violinist Steven Staryk and composers Alan Stout and James Hopkins.  He studied in France with Nadia Boulanger, and with violinist Broadus Erle at Yale, where he earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree.