Defeat and Triumph

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 will perform 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.

Marco Blaauw enjoys an international solo career and is a member of Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne, Germany. An important focus of his work is to further develop the instrument and its playing technique, and to initiate new repertoire.

Marco works in close collaboration with both the established and younger composers of our time. Many composers have written works especially for him, including Péter Eötvös, Georg Friedrich Haas, Rebecca Saunders, Wolfgang Rihm and John Zorn. He also worked intensely with Karlheinz Stockhausen for 17 years.

In 2015 Marco established the trumpet ensemble Monochrome Project. In direct collaboration with composer La Monte Young, he presented an eight-trumpet version of Young’s work The Second Dream of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer to audiences throughout Europe.

In 2016 Marco initiated ‘Global Breath’, a worldwide research project focussed on the trumpet. The first stage of this research will culminate in a presentation by international pioneers from different genres and cultural backgrounds in a Global Breath festival in 2021.

Last year Marco intensified his collaboration with painter Gerhard Richter and filmmaker Corinna Belz, producing the soundtrack to the film Moving Picture (946-3), with music for trumpet and live electronics by Rebecca Saunders. From 2020 onwards he will present this project in festivals, concert halls, museums and art galleries.

Marco Blaauw is also intensely active as a teacher.  He gives masterclasses internationally and has taught at the International Darmstadt Summer Courses, the Stockhausen Courses Kürten and the Lucerne Festival Academy.