Cristian Fatu knows how a violin makes its sound.

A participant in the Violin Society of America’s Oberlin Acoustics Workshop since 2013, he works alongside the scientists and master luthiers who study the instrument itself, has performed tonal optimizations with Thomastik-Infeld strings, and has filmed side-by-side comparisons of Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù violins from the collection of Dr. William Sloan. His conviction is quietly contrarian: a great violin is an optimised tool, not a relic; a great modern instrument can stand beside the legends of Cremona. He proves the point nightly on his own 2018 Samuel Zygmuntowicz.

Born in Bucharest, Fatu began the violin at four and trained at the George Enescu Music Lyceum and the National Music University of Bucharest, later at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln and Park University in the United States, studying with Ștefan Gheorghiu, Mihaela Martin and Ben Sayevich. A prizewinner in more than twenty-five national and international competitions, he carries the Romanian violin tradition of Enescu, Porumbescu and Dinicu as a birthright, an arc he traced on the album From Bucharest to Kansas City.

In America, Fatu led the Montclaire String Quartet as first violinist and served as concertmaster of the Charleston Chamber Orchestra while on the faculty of West Virginia State University. In February 2019 he gave the world premiere of Mathew Jackfert’s Violin Concerto, “A Black Bear Awakens in Winter,” at the Kennedy Center.

Now based in Los Angeles, he lives in two musical worlds at once: on stage with the Pacific Symphony and in LA Ballet productions, at Carnegie Hall with Ensemble Iberica and the Hollywood Bowl with Pink Martini; and inside the scoring stages of Capitol Records, Fox and Warner Brothers, where his violin threads through film and television scores heard by millions. He teaches at the Orange County School of the Arts and at Orange County Music and Dance, and is a regular guest in David Garrett’s Guarneri del Gesù circle of players and collectors.

He is also a father of three, in a house of tubas, jazz standards and practice mutes, which may be the real reason he stays so curious about how sound works.