Violinist Esther Abrami: debut CD of the TikTok star

For her videos on TikTok and Instagram, 25-year-old French violinist Esther Abrami has been named “Best Influential Star” by Forbes magazine. Her first CD is now out.

Violinist with a cat? No problem. A YouTube video showing Esther Abrami practicing while a cat hugs her waist has recently received more than ten million clicks. The musician has gained more than 800,000 followers on social media with unusual videos. This Friday (March 25th) Esther Abrami’s first CD will be released – and it will be released by one of the big, so-called major labels, Sony, which has long been focusing on top-class pianists.

Born in Aix-en-Provence in 1996, trained in London and currently still studying in Birmingham, the classical violinist celebrated success with public concerts at a young age.

She was and is supported, among others, by the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, brother of the well-known musical composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, and early on she was interested in how classical pieces could be made attractive for a young audience. The result can be experienced on TikTok, Youtube or Instagram and can now also be heard on Abrami’s debut CD: Arrangements of classical melodies, for example from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”, Chopin’s “Raindrop Prélude”, a Paganini Caprice or from Eric Satie’s third “Gymnopédie “, in between film music (e.g. from “Chocolat”) and popular music. The violinist will be accompanied by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and by pianist Iyad Sughayer.

The colorful mixture is praised by Sony as “the wide sound panorama of a young generation of classical musicians* beyond traditional clichés”. The violinist herself, who would certainly have career opportunities as a model, raves about working with composers on the arrangements – it’s “real interaction that hardly exists in classical music”.

CD tip: Esther Abrami, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Iyad Sughayer: Works by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Mozart, Bach, Shea, Portman, Satie, Ravel, Chopin and others. Sony Classical