Tedi Papavrami
Violinist – Translator – Writer
Geneva, Switzerland

After arriving in France from Albania in 1982, Tedi Papavrami found himself immersed in a country and culture that were entirely foreign to him. His natural sensitivity, his need to master the French language in order to make this new country his own, and the profound solitude of those early years led him to read voraciously: Stendhal, Proust, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Kafka.

This close relationship with literature led him, in 2000, following the death of the Albanian translator Jusuf Vrioni, to take over the French translation of Ismail Kadare’s works for Éditions Fayard; Papavrami had known the writer as a child in Albania. Entering the literary world also offered him, in his own words, a way of “existing professionally for the first time outside the violin.” In 2013, this path continued with the publication by Robert Laffont of Fugue pour violon seul, his autobiographical memoir.

Alongside his literary work, and following several competition prizes, Tedi Papavrami established himself from the 1990s onwards as a soloist and chamber musician. He has appeared as a soloist under conductors including Kurt Sanderling, Antonio Pappano, Alain Altinoglu, Armin Jordan, Emmanuel Krivine, Manfred Honeck and François-Xavier Roth. His chamber-music partners have included Philippe Bianconi, Gary Hoffman, Xavier Phillips, Nelson Goerner, Viktoria Mullova and Martha Argerich. A particularly important and long-standing collaboration has been with pianist François-Frédéric Guy, with whom he has performed extensively and recorded Beethoven’s complete ten sonatas for violin and piano. His recording of Eugène Ysaÿe’s six Sonatas for Solo Violin, together with Ysaÿe’s Sonata for Two Violins performed with violinist Svetlin Roussev, was awarded both a Diapason d’Or and a Choc de Classica in June 2014.

Based in Geneva, Tedi Papavrami has been Professor of Violin at the Haute École de Musique de Genève (HEM) since September 2008 and Artistic Director of the Variations Musicales de Tannay since 2025. He plays a violin made especially for him in 2022 by the Swiss violin maker David Leonard Wiedmer.