“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.

Barbara Buntrock took her first violin lessons at the age of five; it was only just before entering university-level studies that she discovered her love for the viola, its deeper tones and timbres.
She studied at several music universities: in Cologne with Werner Dickel, in Lübeck with Barbara Westphal, at the Juilliard School in New York City with Heidi Castleman, and in Berlin with Tabea Zimmermann and Lars Anders Tomter.
From February 2009 to December 2010, Barbara Buntrock was Principal Violist of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra but decided to devote herself instead to solo appearances and chamber music.
In 2015, she was appointed Viola Professor at the Robert Schumann University of Music in Düsseldorf.
Buntrock plays a viola made by Antonio Mariani in Pesaro, ca. 1650, an instrument that previously belonged to legendary violist Lionel Tertis.
Her most recent recordings on CD include Walter Braunfels’s Scottish Fantasia (on the Capriccio label) and the viola concertos of Christian Westerhoff (cpo). In contrast to her musical activities, her two children have been the leading voice in Barbara Buntrock‘s life since 2021.