Lorenz Gamma is Professor of Violin at California State University Northridge, where he also serves as Head of Strings and Director of Chamber Music. His previous teaching includes positions at UCLA, Indiana University in Bloomington and the California Institute of the Arts. As Artistic Director of the Borromeo Music Festival in Switzerland, Mr. Gamma conducts a two-week long instrumental program for advanced string and piano students and a professional chamber music concert series with a faculty from leading music schools from around the world including the New England Conservatory, Cleveland Institute of Music, Boston Conservatory, Royal Academy of Music and the University of Southern California.

Mr. Gamma’s private and professional students regularly win prizes at solo and chamber music competitions and have gone on to continue their studies at such institutions as the Juilliard School, Indiana University, the Manhattan and Eastman Schools of Music, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Colburn School, University of Southern California and others.

Having performed internationally a string quartet repertoire of over sixty composers as well as a large part of the standard chamber music repertoire of over a eighty composers Mr. Gamma dedicates himself passionately to coaching chamber music. During his tenure as co-leader of the Amar Quartett in Switzerland, Mr. Gamma performed for three years a full-time concert schedule touring through many of Europe’s most important chamber music venues, including the Tonhalle in Zurich, the Victoria Hall in Geneva, the Residence in Munich, the Cologne Philharmonic, as well as in venues in many other cities such as London, Paris, New York and others. For ten years, Lorenz Gamma served as first violinist of Los Angeles based Southwest Chamber Music. The ensemble’s recordings of the complete chamber music works of Carlos Chávez have been nominated for six Grammy Awards, winning one in 2004 and one in 2005. Mr. Gamma also served as concertmaster of the Northwest Sinfonietta in Seattle, and later as Principal of the Zurich Opera Orchestra.

As a soloist Mr. Gamma has performed over twenty different concertos by Bach, Beethoven, Berg, Brahms, Bruch, Gubaidulina, Lutoslawski, Wynton Marsalis, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Piazzolla, Rubinstein, Schnittke, Schumann, Spohr, Tartini, Vivaldi, and Wieniawski. He holds an extensive record of appearances on radio, both in Europe and in the United States; his radio broadcasts and CD recordings include Schubert’s String Quintet and Piano Trio in E-flat, the “Quartet for the End of Time” by Messiæn, the complete String Quartets as well as works for violin and piano and the Piano Sextet by Carlos Chávez, the Dvorák Piano Quintet, Mozart Clarinet Quintet, sonatas and partitas by Bach, Kodály, Lazarof, Mozart and Ravel, as well as string quartets by Brahms, Debussy, Dvorák, Haydn, Hindemith, Ives, Janácek, Mozart, Ortiz, Ravel, Shostakovich, Ullmann, Verdi and Wadada Leo Smith. Chamber musicians Mr. Gamma has collaborated with include, Paul Katz, Ronald Leonard, Donald McInnes, Joseph Silverstein and many others. Composers whom he has collaborated with include Miguel del Aguila, Adrienne Albert, John Adams, Mark Applebaum, Alexandra du Bois, Thüring Bräm, Nancy Bloomer Deussen, Frank Campo, Sofia Gubaidulina, Yalil Guerra, Heinz Holliger, Andrei Kasparov, Rudolf Kelterborn, Daniel Kessner, Peter Knell, Panayiotis Kokoras, Ian Krouse, Christian Lauba, Henri Lazarof, Tomás Marco, Liviu Marinescu, Arthur McCaffrey, Margaret Meier, Mark Menzies, Thea Musgrave, Maria Newman, Gabriela Ortiz, Robert Paterson, Deon Nielsen Price, Kurt Rhode, Thomas Daniel Schlee, Patricio da Silva, Wadada Leo Smith, Chrysanthe Tan, Vu Nhat Tan, Pham Minh Tang, Ton That Tiet, David Werfelmann, Stephen Westerhout, Gernot Wolfgang and many others.

Lorenz Gamma was born in Switzerland, where he received his initial training as a violinist at the conservatory in Lucerne. His further studies took place in the United States, with Franco Gulli, Steven Staryk and Mark Kaplan.