How it all began ...

Ten fingers on eight strings!
Two “devil’s violinists” conquer Hamburg ....

Like so many successful music quartets, Salut Salon started as a duet, two constant companions; a perfect team of two women who have known each other since childhood,  and who have grown together artistically – both passionate about music, both “devil’s violinists”: Iris Siegfried and Angelika Bachmann.

Together they broke their strings in the school orchestra, founded a flat-share while they were at university, travelled the world, a tour they financed by busking wherever they went. After their return to their native Eppendorf, a neighbourhood in central Hamburg (to be precise: at the home of a friend, Ameli Winkler) Iris and Angelika established – all out of sheer passion for their art- their legendary “jour fixe”, in keeping with the tradition of art-lovers at the turn of the last century, who paid homage to the literary and musical muses by meeting for recitals and performances in each other’s houses.  

Passion, however, has unforeseeable consequences: the favourite piece of the very first quartet formation (Angelika Bachmann, Iris Siegfried, Ameli Winkler and Simone Bachmann) – Edward Elgar’s “Salut d’amour” – was the inspiration for the name “Salut Salon”, and after the very first public performance (with three apparently magical pieces) the German national newspaper “Welt am Sonntag” declared: “A quartet is born” ...

From then on, things went up and up (like a rocket), a development of which the performance venues alone are proof. After a concert in the prestigious mirrored room, or Spiegelsaal, in the Hamburger Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, an Austrian concert organizer asked whether they wouldn’t consider performing at the larger, higher profile Hamburger Musikhalle: Salut Salon had arrived in the musical heart of Hamburg.

In the last two years, Salut Salon has succeeded in making an artistic quantum leap with two widely acclaimed, opening concerts to their tours at the Thalia Theater:  “Herzenssache” (2008) and “Klassisch verführt” (2009) were not only constant box-office sell-outs, but concert events in a class all of their own, in which brilliantly arranged medleys and wonderful solo interpretations, humorous musical cabaret and poetic puppet show, as well as cruelly satirical chanson and sizzling tango were interwoven so masterfully that the usually cool, respectable Hamburgers were well and truly swept into exuberance.  And this love story isn’t over yet: the Thalia Theater and all Hamburg are looking forward excitedly to next July, when Salut Salon’s new programme will enchant ears and eyes and conquer hearts ...