Vladimir Jurowski & Julia Fischer

Vladimir Jurowski has been Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin since 2017. He has meanwhile extended his contract until 2027. In parallel, he has been General Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich since 2021.

After receiving training at the Moscow Conservatory The conductor, pianist and musicologist Vladimir Jurowski emigrated to Germany in 1990. Here he continued his studies at the music conservatories in Dresden and Berlin.  In 1995 he made his international debut at the British Wexford Festival with Rimski-Korsakov’s Mainacht and in the same year at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden with Nabucco. Subsequently he was, among other things, First Kapellmeister of the Komische Oper Berlin (1997- 2001) and Music Director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera (2001-2013). In 2003 Vladimir Jurowski was appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and has been its Principal Conductor since 2007 until 2021. He was also Artistic Director of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra Yevgeny Svetlanov of the Russian Federation until 2021, Artistic Director of the International George Enescu Festival in Bucharest and Principal Artist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Great Britain. He works regularly with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the ensemble unitedberlin.

Vladimir Jurowski has conducted the major orchestras of Europe and North America, including the Berlin, Vienna and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, the Boston and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

He is a recurring guest conductor in in London, Berlin, Dresden, Luzern, Schleswig-Holstein und Grafenegg as well as at the Rostopowitsch-Festival. Although Vladimir Jurowski is invited as a guest conductor by top orchestras from all over the world, in future he would like to concentrate his activities on that geographical area which is acceptable to him from an ecological point of view.

In 2022/2023 he performed with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin in concerts in various cities in Germany, Italy and Antwerp in the Netherlands. The joint CD recordings of Vladimir Jurowski and the RSB began in 2015 with Alfred Schnittke’s Symphony No. 3, followed by works by Britten, Hindemith, Strauss, Mahler and soon again Schnittke.

Vladimir Jurowski has been the recipient of numerous awards for his achievements, including various international record prizes. In 2016, he was bestowed an honorary doctorate from Prince Charles at the Royal College of Music in London. In 2018, the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards named him Conductor of the Year. In summer 2020, Jurowski was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit by the Romanian President in recognition of his work as Artistic Director of the George Enescu Festival.

Julia Fischer has been at the top of the world’s violin elite for 20 years. She also expresses her artistic diversity as a pianist, chamber musician and professor. As  the first artist in the field of classical music, she founded her own music platform, the JF CLUB.

As the daughter of  of German-Slovakian parents born in Munich, she  received her first violin lessons at the age of three. Shortly afterwards her mother Viera Fischer gave Julia Fischer her first piano lessons.  At the age of nine  she was accepted as a junior student of the renowned violin professor Ana Chumachenco at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich. In 2011, Julia Fischer took her position at the very same institute from her former teacher.

Recent highlights of her career include concerts with the New York Philharmonic (Philippe Jordan), the Orchestre National de France (Emmanuel Krivine), with the Bavarian State Orchestra (Kirill Petrenko), the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Riccardo Muti), the Cleveland Orchestra (Franz Welser-Möst), the Vienna Philharmonic (Esa-Pekka Salonen) or the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich (Herbert Blomstedt).

Julia Fischer regularly conducts the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, which has long been associated with her, and in May 2022 she will go on tour with the London orchestra, making   stops in Germany, Talinn, Barcelona and Madrid. Julia Fischer is Artist in Residence with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the current season with numerous performances in London and across Europe. She also performs, among other, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (Vasily Petrenko), the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (Vladimir Jurowski) and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks (Michael Tilson Thomas).

Julia Fischer is also an enthusiastic chamber musician. The Julia Fischer Quartet with her long-time chamber music partners Alexander Sitkovetsky, Nils Mönkemeyer and Benjamin Nyffenegger will be touring again in January 2022. A recording of Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet was made in autumn 2020 together with Oliver Schnyder, Andreas Janke, Nils Mönkemeyer and Benjamin Nyffenegger for the JF CLUB. In November 2021 she went on another recital tour with Yulianna Avdeeva.

In 2017, Julia Fischer founded her own music platform, the JF CLUB, where her new recordings can be heard exclusively and where she provides insights into her work trough articles, videos or even personal meetings. With this, she is taking a new and individual path in the classical music market. In August 2021, Eugène Ysaye’s sonatas were released as a limited vinyl-edition in an exclusive JF CLUB edition .

Julia Fischer has previously released numerous CD and DVD recordings, first for  the Pentatone label and then for Decca. Her recordings have been met with the highest praise from internationally pioneering media and received numerous awards, including the BBC Music Magazine Award, the Choc der Monde de la Musique, the Diapason d’Or de l’Année or the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik.

Teaching is especially close to Julia Fischer’s heart. She feels a great need to be able to pass on something of her own childhood experiences. Her students have been very successful and are already being invited by major orchestras. Occasionally Julia Fischer performs together with them.

In the summer of 2019, Julia Fischer founded the Kindersinfoniker, an orchestra for children aged 6 to 14, which she leads together with the pianist Henri Bonamy and the conductor Johannes X. Schachtner. Julia Fischer also regularly gives master classes at the music holidays at Lake Starnberg.

Many awards honour the artist, she received the Federal Cross of Merit, the Bavarian Order of Maximilian and prizes such as the internationally highly regarded Gramophone Award or the German Culture Prize. She was included in the Century Violinist CD Edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Julia Fischer plays on a violin by Giovanni Battista Guadagnini (1742) as well as on a new violin by Philipp Augustin (2018).