Léonie Sonning Talent Prize recipient 2025
Violinist
When Annissa, then three years old, asked her parents if she might play the violin, they took her down to the local music school in New York. But the answer was no. She was too young. Annissa’s mother, who had herself played a little violin, would not let the dream die. She took a cardboard pasta box, stuck a ruler into it, and gave her daughter her very first violin. For a year, Annissa walked around with the box, listened to classical music and waited impatiently to turn four so that the music school would accept her. It did, and she has played ever since. Today, however, it is on a rather different newly built violin: a Greiner instrument on loan from the Augustinus Foundation.
Annissa was born in 2005 in New York. Her father is Danish and her mother American, and neither of them is a professional musician. Even so, there was music in the home. Annissa’s mother had attended a school as a child where the Suzuki method was being introduced, and had kept up her violin playing enough to sit at home and play from time to time. That was enough to light the spark in Annissa, who at the age of four heard the third movement of Sibelius’ Violin Concerto and thought: wow, that is unbelievably cool.
By the time the family moved to Denmark, Annissa had just turned five. She was fortunate enough to become a pupil of Tove Detrekoey – in fact Tove’s very last young pupil. Lessons took place at the old Suzuki Institute in Gentofte, a place Annissa remembers as a cosy house with a fireplace and antique furniture, not at all like a music school. The years with Tove became a wonderful foundation for Annissa’s musical development.
At the age of eight, Annissa won the DR Symphony Orchestra’s talent competition and was invited to perform the third movement of Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor with the orchestra in the DR Concert Hall. “It is probably still one of the most fun things I have ever tried. There is nothing like standing on stage with an orchestra,” Annissa says of an experience that has stayed with her.
At ten she entered the pre-college programme, and at just thirteen she was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Music. That meant leaving state school and instead following a Cambridge English programme alongside her studies. “My parents trusted me a lot. I came to them at thirteen and said, Mum and Dad, I want to apply to the conservatoire, and they said yes,” she explains.
Since then, her career has taken her to London, where she completed both master’s and Artist Diploma studies at the Royal College of Music, and on to New York, where she receives tuition from Pinchas Zukerman.
Ask Annissa about her plans for the future, and the answer is open-ended. There was a time when she liked to make firm career plans, but she has left that approach behind. “I have entered a mindset that says: if a door opens, you might as well walk through it. Play everything that can be played, and figure out the bigger picture later,” as she puts it. Whether it will be as a soloist, chamber musician or orchestral player, she does not want to pin herself down. She loves all of it, and also dreams of teaching one day.
One experience that underlined for Annissa the value of making music together came when she flew from New York to Denmark and went straight from the airport to the opera house to play the final performance of Puccini’s Tosca with the Royal Danish Orchestra. By the end of the day, she had been awake for thirty-six hours. But it was worth every moment. “We reached the very last great aria, and I looked around, and everyone in the orchestra had tears in their eyes. And the audience loved it. You could feel that we were part of something together, something people genuinely enjoyed. There is just something special about that – being together through music.”
From a pasta box in New York to the DR Concert Hall, the Royal Albert Hall and the opera pit. Things have already moved quickly for twenty-year-old Annissa Gybel, and it is far from over yet.
