Christoph Poppen is highly regarded as a violinist and conductor championing contemporary music, often recording for the influential ECM and Hänssler Classic labels. He is also an important educator.

Poppen was born in Münster on March 9, 1956. He took up the violin as a child and made rapid progress, winning the Kocian Competition in what was then Czechoslovakia when he was 14. Poppen attended the Robert Schumann Institute in Düsseldorf, graduating in 1976. He continued taking private violin lessons with Joseph Gingold, Oscar Shumsky, and Nathan Milstein. Prizes, including the Preis des Kulturkreises im Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie in 1975 and the International Vaclav Huml Violin Competition in Zagreb in 1977, established Poppen's career. He founded the Cherubini String Quartet in 1978, serving for many years as its first violinist and winning several prizes, including first prize at the 1981 International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France, as part of the group. His long career as an educator began in 1988 when he joined the faculty of the Hochschule für Musik Detmold.

The following year, Poppen was named artistic director of the Detmold Chamber Orchestra, and since then, he has divided his time among violin performance, conducting, and teaching. In 1995, he moved to a set of new positions, becoming the artistic director of the Münchener Kammerorchester and a professor at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin; he served as director of the latter institution in the late 1990s. In 1998, Poppen and the Münchener Kammerorchester backed Poppen's former student Isabelle Faust on an album of Haydn violin concertos, and the following year, teacher and student joined forces with the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart and conductor Helmuth Rilling on an album of Bach violin concertos; that album was reissued in 2019. In the 2000s, Poppen conducted the Münchener Kammerorchester in a group of recordings on the ECM label, mostly of contemporary music. He became the music director of the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken in 2006, remaining with the group as it became the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern.

Poppen has made numerous appearances as a guest conductor, and in 2015, he became the principal guest conductor of the Hong Kong Sinfonietta. Poppen has served as the artistic director of the Festival International de Música de Marvão in Portugal, where in 2019, he founded the International Academy of Music, Arts, and Science. Since 2014, he has been the principal conductor of the Cologne Chamber Orchestra. He has continued to record, mostly as a conductor, for such premium labels as Hänssler Classic, Oehms, and Wergo, and in 2021, he recorded Mozart's Mass in C major, K. 317 (Coronation), with the Cologne Chamber Orchestra and West German Radio Chorus Cologne for Naxos. He teaches violin and chamber music at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich. ~ James Manheim, Rovi