Childhood

I was born in Winterthur to a Swiss mother and an Iranian father. My childhood was filled with a lot of love, a mixture of home cooking and Iranian cuisine (which gave our apartment an unmistakable smell) and the complex patterns of our Persian carpets. I clearly stood out from the crowd with my olive-colored skin, which triggered two things in me: on the one hand, I often withdrew and, on the other, I searched for an inner world. This is how I discovered my great imagination, which soon flowed into the language of music, which was easier for me because it was wordless. One reason for my search for my own world was my older brother Cyrus, who stood out early on with his incredible intellect. Although we were interested in similar things, we instinctively assigned the fields of our lives to each other and were both mighty proud of each other, then as now.

Education

At the age of five, I had my first lessons with the Hungarian teacher Katharina Hardy, who had a notorious reputation for her combination of motherliness and unrelenting strictness. Kati, as I called her much later, had had an unimaginably hard life and had lost almost everything twice, in 1944 and 1956. She later became one of the public voices as a witness to the Holocaust. 

Even though I later had to make great efforts to adjust my technique, today I am grateful to her for having offered me an iron, yet always well-meaning hand at the beginning.

In 1989, I joined Nora Chastain's class as a junior student at what was then the Winterthur Conservatory. It is thanks to Nora that I found a solid technical foundation. During this time, I also gained my first chamber music experience with a string quartet. I can still remember how we unpacked our instruments while waiting at a deserted train station and started playing the Shostakovich Quartet No. 3 from memory. At the same time, John Holloway came to the university for a master class. That was my first and extremely formative encounter with historical performance practice, which has really stayed with me ever since.

Specialization

After graduating in 1992, I looked for further opportunities in nearby countries and had to take a detour via Aachen until I finally ended up with Hansheinz Schneeberger in Freiburg im Breisgau. The work was inspiring, but not always easy from a human point of view, to which I reacted as I used to: I withdrew and practiced for hours on end. I did the same later when I ended up in Basel, the city of my heart today. From 1996, I studied at the music academy with Raphael Oleg, who accompanied me more than guided me on my interpretative quest and thus helped me to broaden my own horizons. Hence the step across the courtyard into the rooms of the Schola and to Chiara Banchini, with whom I maintained loose contact from then on, was not far. After graduating in 1999, I would have liked to continue my studies at the Schola, but I got tired of studying. I needed some time out, which turned into another detour.

After a few months of professional uncertainty, in 2000 I won a position in the 1st violin tutti at the Zurich Opera, now the Philharmonia Zurich. I was overjoyed at first, but soon realized that I could hardly keep up with practicing (Tosca! Hollander! Rosenkavalier! Wagner's Ring!) and that my love of chamber music was being neglected. However, the productions with conductors such as Charles Dutoit, Christoph von Dohnányi and Nikolaus Harnoncourt remain unforgettable - and the latter even led me to the decision to study baroque violin alongside my career.

But things turned out differently. In 2002, after a week of what felt like endless rehearsing, I ended up with a tinnitus and a hyperacusis. The way back into the orchestra seemed blocked. I plunged ahead instead: into a full course of study with Chiara Banchini at the Schola Cantorum, away from the large orchestra and towards quieter instruments, smaller groups, shorter works and, above all, a desire for independent, detailed music-making, which even today is by no means a matter of course in a large orchestra.

That's how I found my place and my center, and in retrospective I am grateful for what seemed to be huge detour. The fact that I am who I am today is thanks to all the people on my path - and the courage to consciously confront each step.

Today I live with my two children in Basel, where I also teach and prefer to relax by reading or cooking.

If you want to know how the story continues, you can download and use the official CV.