Maria Milstein is a French-Russian violinist born in 1985 in Moscow. She comes from a family of Russian musicians: her grandfather Yakov Milstein was a musicologist and piano professor at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow. She began playing the violin at the age of five, and in 1991 her family moved to France.
She began her professional musical training with the violinist Pavel Vernikov in Fiesole, Italy. She then entered the Amsterdam Conservatory, where she studied in the class of the violinist Ilya Grubert and graduated with the highest marks, earning a bachelor's degree in 2008. She later completed a master's degree in London in 2010 with the violinist David Takeno.
Milstein plays a violin made by Michel Angelo Bergonzi of Cremona, Italy, which is on loan from the Dutch Musical Instruments Foundation. Since 2005, she has also performed in a duo with her sister, the pianist Nathalia Milstein.
Between 2011 and 2014, she was artist in residence at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Belgium, in the class of the violinist and conductor Augustin Dumay. She has been invited to perform in the Netherlands and has appeared as a soloist with the National Orchestra of Belgium, the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Chamber Orchestra of Wallonia, the Musica Viva Orchestra, and Sinfonietta Amsterdam. In 2017, she made her debut as a soloist with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in Glazunov's concerto under the direction of Vasily Petrenko.
In 2015, with the pianist Hanna Shybayeva, she recorded the album Sounds of War for Cobra Records, featuring sonatas by Francis Poulenc, Leoš Janáček, and Sergei Prokofiev. That album received an Edison Klassiek Award in the chamber music category the same year. In February 2016, she was awarded a Borletti-Buitoni Trust fellowship for artists or ensembles at a developing stage of their careers. Since September 2014, she has taught at the Amsterdam Conservatory.
In 2004, Milstein founded the Van Baerle Trio with pianist Hannes Minnaar and cellist Gideon den Herder, whom she had met during their studies at the Amsterdam Conservatory. The ensemble was formed under the guidance of the Russian musician Dmitri Ferschtman, and in 2008 the pianist Menahem Pressler invited the trio to accompany him in various performances. The ensemble was recognized at the ARD International Music Competition in Munich and the Lyon International Chamber Music Competition, and it won the Vriendenkrans Competition and the Kersjes Prize in the Netherlands.
In 2014, the Van Baerle Trio took part in the ECHO Rising Stars tour and performed in major European venues including the Cologne Philharmonic, the Barbican Centre in London, the Musikverein in Vienna, and the City of Music in Paris. Two albums resulted from this collaboration: a first disc for the label Et'cetera devoted to works by Theo Loevendie, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Maurice Ravel, which won an Edison Klassiek Award, and a second album, Felix Mendelssohn, Piano Trios, released by Challenge Records in September 2014.
Her discography also includes La Sonate de Vinteuil, recorded with Nathalia Milstein and released in 2017, featuring works by Pierné, Saint-Saëns, Hahn, and Debussy. In 2017, critic Graham Rickson of The Arts Desk praised the first album by the Milstein sisters, writing that they gave everything they had, captivated the audience, and brought a true joy for life to the music, while describing Debussy's Violin Sonata on the recording as beautifully performed.