RSB on Tour: Basel

Vladimir Jurowski has been Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the RundfunkSinfonieorchester Berlin (RSB) since 2017. In 2023/2024, his concerts, tours and recordings were the highlights of the ‘RSB100’ anniversary season. His current contract in Berlin runs until 2029,
while he has also been General Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich since 2021.

Vladimir Jurowski, one of the most sought-after conductors of our time, who is celebrated worldwide for his innovative musical interpretations and equally for his courageous artistic commitment, was born in Moscow in 1972 and completed the first part of his music studies at the Music College of the Moscow Conservatory. He moved to Germany with his family in 1990 and continued his studies at the music academies in Dresden and Berlin. In 1995, he made his debut at the Wexford Festival in Ireland with Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Mainacht’ and in 1996 at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden with ‘Nabucco’. He was then First Kapellmeister of the Komische Oper Berlin (1997-2001).

Vladimir Jurowski worked as Chief Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) for fifteen years until 2021 and has since been appointed Conductor Emeritus. In the UK, he was Music Director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera from 2001 to 2013, leading a wide range of highly acclaimed productions. His close connection to British musical life was recognised by King Charles III in spring 2024 when he appointed Vladimir Jurowski an Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE). In April 2024, Vladimir Jurowski returned to London as a guest conductor to complete the concert performance cycle of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ with ‘Götterdämmerung’ with the LPO at the Royal Festival Hall.

He was Artistic Director of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra ‘Yevgeny Svetlanov’ of the Russian Federation until 2021 and Principal Artist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in Great Britain, as well as Artistic Director of the International George Enescu Festival in Bucharest. He has also worked with the unitedberlin ensemble for many years. Vladimir Jurowski has suspended performances in Russia since February 2022. Ukrainian works are and will remain part of his repertoire, as will works by Russian composers.

Vladimir Jurowski has conducted concerts by the most important orchestras in Europe and North America, including the Berlin, Vienna and New York Philharmonics, 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 Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig. He is a regular guest at the music festivals in London, Berlin, Dresden, Lucerne, SchleswigHolstein and Grafenegg. Although Vladimir Jurowski is invited as a guest conductor by top orchestras from all over the world, he now concentrates his activities on those geographical areas that he can easily reach with reasonable effort from an ecological point of view.

The joint CD recordings by Vladimir Jurowski and the RSB began in 2015 with Alfred Schnittke’s Symphony No. 3, followed by works by Britten, Hindemith, Strauss, Mahler and again Schnittke. Vladimir Jurowski has been honoured many times for his achievements, including numerous international record awards. In 2016, he received an honorary doctorate from the Royal Philharmonic Society from the hands of the current King Charles III. In 2020, Vladimir Jurowski’s work as Artistic Director of the George Enescu Festival was honoured by the Romanian President with the Order of Cultural Merit.

“A brilliant musician and an extraordinary visionary” (Wall Street Journal), Pierre-Laurent Aimard is widely acclaimed as an authority on music of our time while also recognised for shedding fresh light on music of the past.

In the 2025/26 season, Pierre-Laurent celebrates the 100th birthday of his longtime friend and collaborator György Kurtág with recitals at the Budapest Music Centre, Philharmonie Luxembourg and as part of his residency with Madrid’s Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical. J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Vol.2 also constitutes a programme mainstay throughout the season surrounding the release of the album in October 2025, which follows 11 years after the success of Vol.1. Scheduled performances include Concertgebouw Amsterdam, London’s Southbank Centre, Konzerthaus Dortmund, Stockholm Konzerthaus, Seattle Benaroya Hall, Chamber Music Detroit and Boston Celebrity Series. Aimard’s extensive recital schedule also includes the Louvre, NTCH Taipei, NCPA Beijing and Shanghai Concert Hall. With orchestra, Aimard makes solo appearances across the season with the New York Philharmonic, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Stuttgart Kammerorchester, Hamburg Symphoniker, NDR Radiophilharmonie, Concerto Budapest, Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Singapore Symphony and Seoul Philharmonic.

Aimard has enjoyed close collaborations with leading composers, including Helmut Lachenmann, Elliott Carter, Harrison Birtwistle, György Kurtág, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Marco Stroppa and Olivier Messiaen, and given many notable premieres; most recently DIVISONS for four hands by George Benjamin at Berlin’s Boulez Saal, which he repeats in the 2025/26 season at 92NY, the Library of Congress in Washington, and London’s Wigmore Hall. He also continues his associations with regular chamber music partners, most notably Isabelle Faust, Jörg Widmann and Jean-Guihen Queyras, touring Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw, Kölner Philharmonie, Konzerthaus Wien, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, and Madrid’s Auditorio Nacional with Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

In 2025 Aimard released Kurtág: Játékok. The latest in a series of critically acclaimed collaborations with Pentatone, it was awarded five stars by BBC Music Magazine. It follows Schubert: Ländler (2024), the complete Bartók Piano Concertos with Esa-Pekka Salonen and San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (2023), Visions de l’Amen (2022) recorded with Tamara Stefanovich, Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata & Eroica Variations (2021), and Messiaen’s magnum opus Catalogue d’oiseaux (2018), which garnered multiple awards, including the German Record Critics’ Award.

Aimard is widely recognised as an innovative curator and uniquely significant interpreter of piano repertoire from every age. Previous residencies include the complete cycle of Beethoven’s piano concertos for Musikkollegium Winterthur and ground-breaking projects at Porto’s Casa da Musica, New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, Konzerthaus Vienna, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Lucerne Festival, Mozarteum Salzburg, Cité de la Musique in Paris, Tanglewood Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, and as Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 2009 to 2016.

The recipient of many prizes, Aimard was awarded the prestigious International Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2017 in recognition of a life devoted to the service of music and the Leonie Sonning Music Prize, Denmark’s most prominent music award in 2022. A member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, Aimard has held professorships at the Hochschule Köln and was previously an Associate Professor at the College de France, Paris. In spring 2020, he re-launched a major online resource in collaboration with the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, Explore the Score, which centres on the performance and teaching of Ligeti’s piano music.

Omar Ebrahim, born in Greasbrough in South Yorkshire, studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and was initially engaged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and in the chorus of Glyndebourne Touring Opera, where he took on his first solo role as Schaunard (La bohème). In his home country, he has performed at Almeida Opera, Opera Holland Park, English Touring Opera, City of Birmingham Touring Opera, London’s South Bank Centre and the Linbury Theatre of London’s Royal Opera House Covent Garden, as well as at the Theater Basel, the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville, the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels and the Vlaamse Opera. Specialising in the contemporary opera repertoire, he was involved in the world premieres of Liza Lim’s The Navigator at the Brisbane Festival and Enno Poppe’s work Nahrung Wohnung at the Munich Biennale; He has also sung in operas by John Adams, Luciano Berio, Harrison Birtwistle, Hans Jürgen von Bose, John Casken, Kris Defoort, Jonathan Dove, Péter Eötvös, Philip Glass, Catherine Kontz, Peter Lieberson, Tod Machover, Michael Nyman, Stephen Oliver, Nigel Osborne, Edward Rushton and Sir Michael Tippett. He has appeared regularly on the concert platform with the Ensemble Modern, the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the London Sinfonietta; For example, he has appeared in György Ligeti’s Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures (with the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Pierre Boulez and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen), in Arnold Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon-Buonaparte (at the Salzburg Festival and in the Royal Festival Hall) and in Richard Strauss’ Enoch Arden (at IRCAM in Paris). He teaches at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in Greenwich.