Christian Danowicz was born in 1983 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At the age of four, he moved with his family to France.  His father was his first violin teacher. He is a graduate of the Conservatory in Toulouse where he studied with Gilles Colliard. He completed his Master’s studies at Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, under the tutelage of Julia and Krzysztof Jakowicz, in 2010. The same year, he completed a Bachelor’s Degree from the opera and symphonic conducting class of Antoni Wit. He now studies conducting under the direction of prof. Tomasz Bugaj, at Fryderyk Chopin University. He is also pursuing doctoral studies at the Wroclaw Academy of Music under violin professor Jaroslaw Pietrzak. Danowicz is a laureate of the Tadeusz Wronski International Solo Violin Concourse in Warsaw and received first prize in the chamber music competition of the Duxbury Music Festival, in 2010. Since 2010, he has held the position of concertmaster of the Leopoldinum Chamber Orchestra, in Wroclaw. He performs regularly as a soloist and conductor with the ensemble, and as a member of the Leopoldinum Soloists Trio, he has received a scholarship to study for one year at the Escuela Superior de Musica Reina Sophia in Madrid, in the chamber class of G. Pichler.

Written on 1798, the three string trios of Opus 9, where described by Beethoven as “la meilleure de mes œuvres,” the best of my works. They were dedicated to Count Johann Georg von Browne-Camus, an Austrian nobleman of Irish extraction whose wealth had links to the service of the Russian Imperial family. They were first performed by the violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh with two colleagues from his string quartet, feasibly Franz Weiss on viola and either Nikolaus Kraft or his father Anton on cello. Though the trios were composed during Beethoven’s undervalued early period, as a young piano virtuoso recently arrived in Vienna from Bonn, he wrote with no trace of piano idiom, but rather a fluent command of all three instruments. The three trios make a strikingly varied set, the first energetic and buoyant, the second somewhat restrained, the third dramatic and compelling. Dr Richard E. Rodda described the first of the Trios of Opus 9 thusly,

The G major Trio opens with a sonorous unison statement of the tonic arpeggio in slow tempo which is immediately balanced by a soft, feathery, sixteenth-note motive in the violin answered by tiny replies from the viola and cello. […] The main theme comprises four small but distinct gestures: a quiet lyrical phrase; a quick upward-shooting scale; a rising arpeggio; and bold leaping chords.  The Adagio is an extended and delicately elaborated song for which the designation “Romanze”  might have been more appropriate. The music’s lyricism suggests the influence of opera, a quality which its intensity of expression, often enhanced by a tender, pulsing accompaniment, only strengthens. The following Scherzo is lighter in mood and more deft in scoring than many of Beethoven’s later movements in that form. The sonata-form finale contrasts a heady moto perpetuo main theme with an arching complementary melody in more sedate rhythms. […] The work ends with a fiery coda that exploits the technical resources of the three instruments.

Alixandra Porembski, English Language Annotator