“As an interpreter, I’ve started trusting my inner life more and letting the audience in,” he says. “It’s a kind of vulnerability that makes you stronger.” His first child was born at the end of 2018. Since then, his conviction has grown, his sense for metaphor expanded.
He knows that making music for an audience occasionally involves tipping the scales too far one way or another. But he is aware of his responsibility toward what is often called the “intentions of the composer.” He dives deep into scores, investigating the organic connections that give a work its unity. “If you know one room in an apartment, but not that the apartment has seven other rooms, you won’t even understand the room you’re in,” he says.
For Julian, these experiences and encounters are the result of organic growth, not external pressure.
It’s a development that tends to happen when a musician of his ability goes through life with an open mind.
His playing is effortless, unhindered by technical boundaries. He derives energy from appearing not to try. It’s a quality that many look for and few find. He sees his talent and his musical upbringing as a gift. His mentors are responsible for the rest.
“My very first teacher considered lightness and simplicity to be at the core of cello playing,” Julian says. “Listen to yourself, plan what you’re doing, get it right the first time. I owe everything to these insights.” He studied with Ulrich Voss, Gustav Rivinius, Boris Pergamenschikow, Heinrich Schiff and Antje Weithaas. Now he is a teacher himself, at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich.
On this recording Julian Steckel plays a cello by Andrea Guarneri (Cremona, 1685). When he’s not performing, he lives in Berlin.

Born in 1970, Paul Rivinius received his first piano lessons at the age of five. His first teachers were Gustaf Grosch in Munich and Alexander Sellier, Walter Blankenheim and Nerine Barrett at the Saarbrücken College of Music. He continued his piano studies with Raymund Havenith and Gerhard Oppitz at the Munich College of Music, where he graduated with distinction in 1998.
For many years Paul Rivinius was a member of the German National Youth Orchestra and of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra under Claudio Abbado.
He also enjoyed considerable success with the Clemente Trio, an ensemble founded in 1986: the trio won the prestigious ARD Competition in Munich in 1998 and was subsequently selected as a „Rising Star“ ensemble, resulting in guest appearances in the ten most important concert halls in the world, including the Carnegie Hall in New York and the Wigmore Hall in London.
He also plays alongside his brothers in the Rivinius Piano Quartet, and since 2004 he has been the pianist of the Mozart Piano Quartet, which performs throughout Europe, North and South America.
Paul Rivinius taught for many years as a professor of chamber music at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin; he now lives as a freelance pianist in Munich.