Arthur Trælnes was born in 2002 in Lausanne. He began learning the violin at the age of 6 and, at 16, joined the Haute École de Musique de Lausanne (HEMU) in Gyula Stuller’s class, where he completed his Bachelor’s degree in 2022. He then joined the class of Alexander Kerr (former concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam) at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University (Bloomington, USA), where he earned a Solo Performance Diploma in 2023 and continued with Master’s studies.
Arthur has won numerous prizes in national and international competitions as a soloist, including 3rd Prize and the Audience Prize at the Tibor Varga Junior Competition in 2018, which led to an invitation from Gidon Kremer to perform as a soloist with his orchestra in Latvia. He also won 1st Prize at the International Violin and Orchestra Competition “Premio Rotary per la Musica” in Novi Ligure, Italy (2019), 4th Prize at the Tibor Varga Competition (2021), the Contemporary Music Prize at the Spohr Competition in Weimar in 2022, and 3rd Prize at the Franco Gulli Competition in Rome in 2024.
Arthur has performed as a soloist multiple times in Switzerland, Germany, Georgia, Italy, Latvia, and the United States. He served as concertmaster of the Verbier Festival Orchestra from 2022 to 2024, working closely with renowned conductors such as Simon Rattle, Gianandrea Noseda, Klaus Mäkelä, and Lahav Shani. He has also been a member of the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra since 2023.
He is regularly invited to participate in masterclasses, including at the Kronberg Academy Festival in 2021 (with Kolja Blacher) and at the Thuringian State Music Academy in Sondershausen (with Friedemann Eichhorn) in 2022, where he performed Tchaikovsky’s Concerto with orchestra. In November 2024, he performed Mozart’s 5th Concerto with orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York during a masterclass with Maxim Vengerov.
Arthur plays a Giovanni Battista Ceruti violin from 1797 (Cremona, Italy). During the 2023 edition of the Verbier Festival, he had the opportunity to perform on a Stradivarius (“Hrimali,” 1712).
He also regularly performs as a jazz violinist, notably with his quintet Crome, which has already released two albums (Komorebi, 2020, and Oneiroi, 2023).