Nicholas Carter & James Ehnes

Celebrated recently for his conducting of Brett Dean Hamlet and Britten Peter Grimes at the Metropolitan Opera, Nicholas Carter is one of the leading opera conductors of his generation. Since 2021 he has been Chief Conductor and Co-Operndirektor of Bühnen Bern, following his positions as Kapellmeister at the Staatsoper Hamburg and the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and as Chief Conductor of the Stadttheater Klagenfurt and the Kärntner Sinfonieorchester from 2018 to 2021. Serving as Principal Conductor of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra from 2016 to 2019, Carter has since been in international demand in the symphonic field.

At the heart of Nicholas Carter’s tenure in Bern is the new production of Wagner Der Ring des Nibelungen, which he also conducted at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in the 2023/2024 season. In 2024/2025, he leads a new production of Prokofiev’s Gambler at Staatsoper Stuttgart and returns to Staatsoper Hamburg for Mozart’s Figaro. In previous seaons, he has also worked with the Wiener Staatsoper, Oper Zürich, Oper Köln, Santa Fe Opera and Deutsche Oper am Rhein as well as at the Glyndebourne Festival. His extensive operatic repertoire ranges from Mozart, Verdi, Wagner and Strauss to Russian and French works and contemporary composers such as Brett Dean, with whom he has a close artistic relationship.

Alongside regular collaborations with Australia’s leading symphony orchestras, Carter’s recent and forthcoming symphonic highlights include appearances with the Seattle Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Oregon Symphony, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Métropolitain, Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse, Orchestre National de Lille, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, MDR Sinfonieorchester Leipzig, Bochumer Symphoniker, Brucknerorchester Linz, Seoul Philharmonic and Hong Kong Philharmonic, among others.

James Ehnes has established himself as one of the most sought-after violinists on the international stage. Gifted with a rare combination of stunning virtuosity, serene lyricism and an unfaltering musicality, Ehnes is a favourite guest of many of the world’s most respected conductors including Vladimir Ashkenazy, Marin Alsop, Andrew Davis, Stéphane Denève, Mark Elder, Iván Fischer, Edward Gardner, Paavo Järvi, Juanjo Mena, Gianandrea Noseda, David Robertson and Donald Runnicles. Ehnes’s long list of orchestras he has worked with include the Boston, Chicago, London, NHK and Vienna symphony orchestras, the Los Angeles, New York, Munich and Czech philharmonic orchestras, and the Cleveland, Philadelphia, Philharmonia and DSO Berlin orchestras.

Read more In 2021, Ehnes was announced as the recipient of the coveted Artist of the Year title in the 2021 Gramophone Awards which celebrated his recent contributions to the recording industry. This includes the launch of a new online recital series entitled ‘Recitals from Home’ which was released in June 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent closure of concert halls. Ehnes recorded the six Bach Sonatas and Partitas and six Sonatas of Ysaÿe from his home with state-of-the-art recording equipment and released six episodes over the period of two months. These recordings have been met with great critical acclaim by audiences worldwide and Ehnes was described by Le Devoir as being “at the absolute forefront of the streaming evolution”.

Recent orchestral highlights include the MET Orchestra at Carnegie Hall with Gianandrea Noseda, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig with Alexander Shelley, San Francisco Symphony with Marek Janowski, Frankfurt Radio Symphony with Andrés Orozco-Estrada, London Symphony with Daniel Harding, and Munich Philharmonic with Jaap van Zweden. In 2017, Ehnes premiered the Aaron-Jay Kernis Violin Concerto with the Toronto, Seattle and Dallas symphony orchestras, and gave further performances of the piece with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Throughout the 21/22 season, Ehnes is named as Artist in Residence with the National Arts Centre of Canada.

Alongside his concerto work, Ehnes maintains a busy recital schedule. He performs regularly at the Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Center Chicago, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Ravinia, Montreux, Chaise-Dieu, the White Nights Festival in St Petersburg, Verbier Festival, Festival de Pâques in Aix, and in 2018 he undertook a recital tour to the Far East, including performances in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. In 2016, Ehnes undertook a cross-Canada recital tour, performing in each of the country’s provinces and territories, to celebrate his 40th birthday.

As part of the Beethoven celebrations, Ehnes was invited to perform the complete cycle of Beethoven Sonatas at the Wigmore Hall in 2019/20. His third and final instalment of Beethoven Violin Sonatas recordings with Andrew Armstrong was released by Onyx in 2020 and was given a glowing review by Gramophone: “[Ehnes gave us] the flawless technique, the purity of his sound, and the extent to which everything always feels elegant and just right, with no attention-grabbing quirks or determined originalities… a huge spectrum of colour and articulation [is] employed”.

As a chamber musician, he has collaborated with leading artists such as Leif Ove Andsnes, Renaud Capuçon, Louis Lortie, Nikolai Lugansky, Yo-Yo Ma, Antoine Tamestit, Jan Vogler, Inon Barnatan and Yuja Wang. In 2010, he formally established the Ehnes Quartet, with whom he has performed in Europe at venues including the Wigmore Hall, Auditorium du Louvre in Paris and Théâtre du Jeu de Paume in Aix, amongst others. Ehnes is the Artistic Director of the Seattle Chamber Music Society.

Ehnes has an extensive discography and has won many awards for his recordings, including a Grammy Award (2019) for his live recording of Aaron Jay Kernis Violin Concerto with the Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot, and a Gramophone Award for his live recording of the Elgar Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Andrew Davis. His recording of the Korngold, Barber and Walton violin concertos won a Grammy Award for ‘Best Instrumental Soloist Performance’ and a JUNO award for ‘Best Classical Album of the Year’. His recording of the Paganini Caprices earned him universal praise, with Diapason writing of the disc, “Ehnes confirms the predictions of Erick Friedman, eminent student of Heifetz: ‘there is only one like him born every hundred years’.” Recent releases include sonatas by Beethoven, Debussy, Elgar and Respighi, and concertos by Walton, Britten, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Strauss, as well as the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Andrew Manze, which was released in October 2017 on Onyx Classics.

Ehnes began violin studies at the age of five, became a protégé of the noted Canadian violinist Francis Chaplin aged nine, and made his orchestra debut with L’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal aged 13. He continued his studies with Sally Thomas at the Meadowmount School of Music and The Juilliard School, winning the Peter Mennin Prize for Outstanding Achievement and Leadership in Music upon his graduation in 1997. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and in 2010 was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada. Ehnes was awarded the 2017 Royal Philharmonic Society Award in the Instrumentalist category.

Ehnes plays the “Marsick” Stradivarius of 1715.