Victoria Martino was a full merit scholarship student, pursuing a doctorate in violin performance (DMA) at the prestigious University of Southern California Thornton School of Music with Eudice Shapiro, when she                       received an invitation from legendary Viennese violinist Eduard Melkus to join both his chamber group,                         Ensemble Eduard Melkus, and Capella Academica Wien, the groundbreaking early music ensemble. A ten-                     year professional sojourn in Vienna established her as one of the leading proponents of the “Wiener                                 Klangstil,” a centuries-old, uniquely Viennese approach to sound production and stylistic performance                         practice of the great Austrian and European classical repertoire. During this period, Ms. Martino regularly                   performed chamber music with the soloists of the Vienna Philharmonic and faculty of the prestigious                               Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, thus becoming firmly ensconced in the city’s most                                   illustrious musical and cultural traditions. While living in Vienna, Ms. Martino also founded her own                             ensemble, The Albertina Soloists, with which she toured internationally, concertizing throughout Europe,                       North America, Australia, and Japan.

Celebrated as a specialist both in early music (“period performance”) and contemporary performance practice, Victoria Martino has an extensive repertoire, spanning six centuries. She is passionately committed to the revival of works by major composers that are rarely performed, and she is renowned for her monographic anniversary concerts and “marathons” of the complete works for violin (unaccompanied and accompanied) by Bach, Beethoven, Bernstein, Brahms, Corelli, Dvorak, Gade, Grieg, Handel, Hindemith, Ives, Lutoslawski, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Nielsen, Pärt, Schubert, Schumann, Sibelius, Strauss, Tartini, Tchaikovsky, and Telemann. Martino’s “Mozart Marathon,” a nine-hour performance of all 32 violin sonatas with her partner,  James Lent, has been presented regularly to public and critical acclaim, since the composer’s 250th birthday in 2006.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University (A.B.) and the University of California (M.A.), Ms. Martino is a specialist in interdisciplinary studies, with advanced academic degrees in art history, literature, and music. In addition to performing solo and chamber music recitals worldwide, she has initiated and presented lecture-concerts exploring the interrelationship between art and music at many notable cultural institutions, including the Guggenheim Museums (New York, Bilbao and Berlin), National Art Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), National Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), National Art Gallery of Slovenia (Ljubljana),  Museum of Western Art (Tokyo), Graphische Sammlung Albertina and Akademie der bildenden Künste (Vienna), Ferdinandeum Tiroler Landesmuseum (Innsbruck), Egon Schiele Centrum (Çesky Krumlov), Museum Moderner Kunst (Passau), Muzeul National Brukenthal (Sibiu),  Palazzo Te (Mantova),  J. Paul Getty Museum (Malibu), MOCA Los Angeles, and Timken Museum of Art (San Diego), to name only a few. Since 2002, Ms. Martino has regularly presented  solo recitals, lecture-concert series, and lecture series at the historical Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla, California, and the Osher Institute at the University of California, San Diego. 

An internationally respected art historian and academic writer, Ms. Martino has curated numerous museum exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and published over 60 catalogue essays and scholarly articles in more than six languages on artists and composers, including Wassily Kandinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Sean Scully, Mimmo Paladino, John Baldessari, Josef Capek, Zoran Music, and many others. She has also participated in international symposia and lectured widely. Ms. Martino has been a guest professor at universities in Australia and the United States, teaching music, art history, and innovative interdisciplinary humanities courses. As a professional art, music, dance, and theater critic, she has published exhibition and performance reviews in THE Magazine, New York Arts, The Berkshire Review for the Arts, The Huffington Post, and many European journals.

Victoria Martino plays an original, unmodified Baroque violin by Michael Andreas Bartl (Vienna, 1760), and a modernized violin by Jakob Stainer (Absam, 1670).