Vladimir Jurowski

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.

Christian Tetzlaff has been one of the most sought-after violinists and most exciting musicians on the classical music scene for many years. “The greatest performance of the work I’ve ever heard,” wrote Tim Ashley (The Guardian, May 2015) of his interpretation of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra and conductor Daniel Harding.

Concerts with Christian Tetzlaff often become an existential experience for the interpreter and audience alike, old familiar works suddenly appear in a completely new light. In addition, he frequently turns his attention to forgotten masterpieces such as Joseph Joachim’s Violin Concerto, which he successfully championed, or the Violin Concerto No. 22 by Giovanni Battista Viotti, a contemporary of Mozart and Beethoven. To broaden his repertoire, he also commits himself to substantial new works, such as Jörg Widmann’s Violin Concerto, which he premiered in 2013. He has an unusually extensive repertoire and performs approximately 100 concerts every year.

Katharine Mehrling lives in Berlin, where she has won the Golden Curtain audience award six times as the city’s most popular actress, for performances in productions including Arizona Lady, Ball at the Savoy and My Fair Lady at the Komische Oper Berlin. She was also awarded the Berlin Bear (BZ Culture Prize) in 2016.

She studied acting and musical theatre at the London Studio Centre and at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York. She made her stage debut in London’s West End, at the Old Vic Theatre as Chrissy in Hair, going on to take the title and leading roles in Irma la Douce, Piaf, Cabaret, End of the rainbow (Judy Garland), Kiss me Kate, The Threepenny Opera, Tell me on a Sunday, Next to normal, Funny Girl and Evita at Vienna’s Ronacher Theater. She created the role of Tippi Hedren in the musical The Birds of Alfred Hitchcock by William Ward Murta, written especially for her.

She also appeared in the Hollywood movie Valkyrie.

Her love of jazz and French chanson is reflected in her live performances and on several CDs, including Hommages, Bonsoir Katharine, Piaf au Bar, Mehrling au Bar, Vive la vie, In love with Judy and Am Rande der Nacht (At the edge of the night), which she wrote with jazz legend Rolf Kühn.

Since their collaboration on Paul Abraham’s jazz operetta Ball at the Savoy, Katharine Mehrling and Barrie Kosky have enjoyed a special artistic friendship. Their collaboration Lonely House, premiered in December 2019 at the Komische Oper Berlin, focuses on Kurt Weill’s exile in Paris and New York. At the Edinburgh Internationalen Festival 2021 Mehrling & Kosky performed two concerts with their Kurt Weill evening LONELY HOUSE, which received 5-star reviews in the British press.

In 2022 Katharine Mehrling represents the Kurt Weill Festival in Dessau as Artist in Residence.