Live concert on the radio:
With Gidon Kremer

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.

Benjamin Kobler was born in 1973 in Munich and grew up in the inspiring atmosphere of a family involved with music and the theatre. He started learning the piano at the age of 5, that was soon followed by the cello, composition and conducting lessons.
His most influential piano teachers were Carmen Piazzini and Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Along with the studies of the piano, he also had lessons with Peter Eötvös in contemporary chamber music. Highlights in his career up until now include concerts in Carnegie Hall, New York and his performance as a soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle.

He began to work with Ensemble Modern in 1995, and became a member of Ensemble Musikfabrik in 2007. Due to this work he has been able to very easily come into contact with artistic personalities such as György Kurtag, György Ligeti, Steve Reich and Zoltan Kocsis. He has performed world Premières from Vykintas Baltakas, Nikolaus Brass, Orm Finnendahl, Enno Poppe, Henri Pousseur and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Along with his teaching at the Stockhausen courses in Kürten, he has had the opportunity to pass on his knowledge at a number of colleges of music. He is also a welcome guest at numerous international festivals.

His decision for contemporary music, after having wandered through phases of jazz, classical and operatic repertoire, was quite easy because the burning question for him is how music can emotionally move people. Answers to this question can be found by not only playing the music himself, but also by having the opportunity to closely question the composers, or to ask them to sing a passage so that they can clearly express what they intend, as music notation can portray only part of what the piece is about.
Along with the contemporary repertoire, Benjamin Kobler hopes to be able to closely study the classical repertoire in the future.

Driven by his strikingly uncompromising artistic philosophy, Gidon Kremer has established a worldwide reputation as one of his generation’s most original and compelling artists.
His repertoire encompasses standard classical scores and music by leading twentieth and twenty-first century composers. He has championed the works of Russian and Eastern European composers and performed many important new compositions, several of which have been dedicated to him. His name is closely associated with such composers as Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, Giya Kancheli, Sofia Gubaidulina, Valentin Silvestrov, Luigi Nono, Edison Denisov, Aribert Reimann, Pēteris Vasks, John Adams, Victor Kissine, Michael Nyman, Philip Glass, Leonid Desyatnikov and Astor Piazzolla, whose works he performs in ways that respect tradition while being fully alive to their freshness and originality. It is fair to say that no other soloist of comparable international stature has done more to promote the cause of contemporary composers and new music for violin.

Gidon Kremer has recorded over 120 albums, many of which have received prestigious international awards in recognition of their exceptional interpretative insights. His long list of honours and awards include the Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis, the Bundesverdienstkreuz, Moscow’s Triumph Prize, the Unesco Prize and the Una Vita Nella Musica – Artur Rubinstein Prize. In 2016 Gidon Kremer has received a Praemium Imperiale prize that is widely considered to be the Nobel Prize of music.

In 1997 Gidon Kremer founded the chamber orchestra Kremerata Baltica to foster outstanding young musicians from the Baltic States. The ensemble tours extensively and has recorded almost 30 albums for the Nonesuch, Deutsche Grammophon, ECM labels. In 2016/17 Kremerata Baltica was on landmark tours through Middle East, North America, Europe, and Asia to celebrate the orchestra’s 20th anniversary.

2019 Gidon Kremer was honoured at the Konzerthaus Berlin with a major “Homage to Gidon Kremer”. in the 2019/2020 season, he himself pays tribute to the revered composer Weinberg on his 100th anniversary with many concerts. Deutsche Grammophon is releasing two albums with orchestral and chamber music works by Weinberg, recorded by and with Gidon Kremer.