Maren Ries

“Maren Ries, the moving spirit of NeoBarock”

Early Music Review, UK, 2020

As a concertmaster, chamber musician and soloist, Maren Ries plays regularly with well-known ensembles in the most important halls and festivals worldwide. Already during her studies, Reinhard Goebel engaged her for his legendary ensemble Musica Antiqua Köln. As a member of the ensemble, she spent the following seven years giving concerts all over the world as a violinist and viola player in the orchestra, the chamber music formation, and as a soloist.
Equipped with such international concert experience, inspiring advice, as well as the strive to realize her own ideas, she founded NeoBarock. As the artistic director, she developed concert formats and CD productions, which have been welcomed by the international critic as new highlights. For the idea and musical realisation of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue” as a melopoem, in collaboration with the Austrian writer Robert Schneider, she received the Echo Klassik Prize. With the CD “Metamorphosis – Bach’s lost trio sonatas”, Maren Ries presented her highly acclaimed reconstructions of the presumed original versions of Bach’s lost trio sonatas. Her interpretations of Biber’s and Tartini’s sonatas on the current album “Arcadia – Paradise in Music” have been praised by the press as “expressive, virtuosic and rich in colour”.

Thanks to her first violin teacher, Maren Ries realized quickly that there is more than on single violin prototype. Instead, every musical era requires an adequate instrument. Already in her school days she played on baroque and classical violins with gut strings. Inspired by her professor Kolja Lessing, she was passionate about the composers of the 20th century during her modern violin studies in Leipzig and Stuttgart.
By visiting master classes and finishing her baroque violin postgraduate studies as a member of the soloist class at the conservatory in Würzburg, she specialized in the music of the 17th and 18th century. For Maren Ries, however, “historically informed performance practice” does not end in the classical period, but extends into the 20th century. In cross-period programmes, she skilfully switches between the modern violin, the baroque violin or the viola.
She passes on her experience in international master classes.

“Painted in sounds by NeoBarock founder Maren Ries”

BR Klassik, Germany, 2022

Baroque Violins

  • Copy of Nicola Amati by Roger G. Hargrave
  • Copy of Gioffredo Cappa by Roger G. Hargrave

Classical Violin

  • Leopold Widhalm, Nuremberg 1769

Romantic Violin

  • Copy of Giuseppe Guarneri, 1741, by Andrew Finnigan and Pia Klaembt

Baroque Viola

  • Copy of the brothers Amati by Roger G. Hargrave

Bows

  • Copies of historical bows by René Groppe, Basil de Visser and Maren Ries