Annika Franke

Born in Dortmund in 2001, Annika Jemima Franke began playing the violin at the age of five and was accepted as a junior student at the International Conservatory at Lake Phoenix in 2012. Her musical development led her to Prof. Yamei Yu's violin class at the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf in 2018, where she began her full-time studies in 2020.
She received valuable musical impulses from Prof. Igor Ozim, Prof. Pavel Vernikov, Prof. Svetlana Makarova, Prof. Boris Garlitsky, Prof. Ingolf Turban and Prof. Stephan Picard, among others. Further master classes with Prof. Grigory Kalinovsky, Prof. Benjamin Schmid, Prof. Elisabeth Kufferath and Prof. Krzysztof Wegrzyn complemented her training.
After her piano trio won a prize at the Sieghardt Rometsch Competition 2023, she was given the opportunity to take part in a master class with Alfred Brendel. Her talent was underlined by numerous awards at competitions such as “Jugend musiziert”. In 2019, she won a first prize at the national competition with the highest score in the category “Violin Solo” combined with a special prize from the German Foundation for Musical Life. In the same year, she was awarded the Music Promotion Prize and the Audience Prize of the Lions Club Jülich, which enabled her to perform as a soloist with an orchestra. She also performed together with internationally renowned young musicians in the chamber music project “Mit Musik - Miteinander” at Kronberg Academy and was also allowed to play in the piano quartet with Prof. Eckardt Runge and Prof. Diana Ketler in 2024.
Her musical versatility is also evident as a member of the German National Youth Orchestra for several years, where she gained experience on international concert tours under the direction of renowned conductors such as Sir Simon Rattle, Kirill Petrenko and Oksana Lyniv.
Since 2022, she has been supported with a Deutschlandstipendium scholarship and is also a scholarship holder of the ‘Yehudi Menuhin - Live Music Now’ Rhine-Ruhr association. In the summer of 2024, she was awarded a classical music scholarship and accepted into the Werner Richard - Dr. Carl Dörken Foundation's scholarship programme.
In addition to her concert activities in concert series such as ‘Debut um 11’ in Recklinghausen and with her piano trio in ‘Best of NRW’, Annika Jemima Franke sees it as her social responsibility to reach out to people with her music and play in social institutions, public benefit concerts, at vernissages in aid of a children's hospice and when laying stumbling blocks, among other things.
She can be seen at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein as the Fiddler in Jerry Bock's “Anatevka”.