MarioHossen

Mario Hossen is one of today’s foremost interpreters of Niccolò Paganini. The Austro-Bulgarian violinist combines two roles that rarely meet in one musician: he performs Paganini on the major stages and, as a researcher and editor, works on the composer’s sources. As a soloist he has appeared with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Moscow Radio Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra, the Bruckner Orchester Linz, the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, the Sofia Philharmonic and the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 2025 he made his debut with the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra.

His repertoire ranges from the Renaissance and the Viennese Classics to the music of our time. Rainer Bischof, Tomás Marco, François-Pierre Descamps, Walter Baer, Alessandro Solbiati and Georgi Arnaoudov have dedicated works to him, and he is a committed advocate of the Bulgarian composers Pancho Vladigerov, Marin Goleminov and Petar Christoskov.

Hossen was born in Plovdiv. His mother, Nelly Batchvarova, was an opera singer, his father a lawyer and diplomat. He has lived in Vienna since 1991 and was granted Austrian citizenship in the special interest of the Republic in 1995. The City of Sofia named him Musician of the Year.

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He began studying the violin at the age of six in Plovdiv with Atanas Batchvarov, continued at the Sofia Academy of Music in the class of Darina Dankova, and went on to study with Michael Frischenschlager at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and with Gérard Poulet in Paris. He made his debut as a soloist with orchestra at eight; at seventeen he performed all 24 Caprices and the violin concertos of Paganini with the leading Bulgarian orchestras. Since then he has played in the most important halls of more than 35 countries.

Niccolò Paganini stands at the centre of his artistic and scholarly work. Hossen studies the sources held in Genoa and Rome and edits Paganini’s music for the Viennese publisher Doblinger, among them the 24 Caprices op. 1 in the series “Diletto Musicale”. Several of his recordings for the Genoese label Dynamic present world premiere recordings of famous Paganini works in their original versions.

In 2019 he founded the Paganini Ensemble Vienna, which is recording Paganini’s complete chamber music for Dynamic. Five volumes had been released by the end of 2025. Also in 2019 he became artistic director of the Varna Summer International Music Festival, the oldest festival in Bulgaria, which celebrated its centenary in 2026.

Mario Hossen is an ambassador of the European Paganini Route, a Cultural Route of the Council of Europe, and artistic director of the Society of Friends of the Music of Niccolò Paganini, founded in Vienna in 2025. His cycle “Paganini 200”, which takes Paganini’s Viennese debut of March 1828 as its starting point, runs until 2032.

His recent recordings include Beethoven’s complete violin sonatas, Handel’s violin sonatas op. 1, the violin concertos of Paganini and Bruch, Mercadante’s quartets for flute and strings, and Bach’s sonatas and partitas with Robert Schumann’s piano accompaniments, recorded with Piero Barbareschi. He has a long-standing chamber music partnership with the pianist Adrian Oetiker.

As a conducting soloist he has led the Vienna Chamber Orchestra in the concert series “Concert Spirituel”. He teaches at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia and directs the International Music Academy Orpheus in Vienna.

Mario Hossen plays a violin made by Giovanni Battista Guadagnini in 1749, on loan from the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, and uses Thomastik-Infeld strings exclusively.

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