Shakespeare!

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.

Ian Bostridge’s international recital career has taken him to the Salzburg, Edinburgh, Munich, Vienna, St Petersburg, Aldeburgh and Schwarzenberg Schubertiade Festivals and to the main stages of Carnegie Hall and the Teatro alla Scala, Milan. He has held artistic residencies at the Vienna Konzerthaus and Schwarzenberg Schubertiade (2003/04), a CarteBlanche series with Thomas Quasthoff at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw (2004/05), a Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall (2005/06), the Barbican, London (2008), the Luxembourg Philharmonie (2010/11), the Wigmore Hall (2011/12) and Hamburg Laeiszhalle (2012/13). In 2018 Ian began an auspicious Artistic Residency with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, the first of its kind for the ensemble.

His recordings have won all the major international record prizes and been nominated for 15 Grammys. They include Schubert Die schöne Müllerin with Graham Johnson (Gramophone Award 1996); Tom Rakewell The Rake’s Progress with Sir John Eliot Gardiner (Grammy Award, 1999); and Belmonte with William Christie. Under his exclusive contract with Warner Classics, recordings included Schubert Lieder and Schumann Lieder (Gramophone Award 1998), English song and Henze Lieder with Julius Drake, Britten’s Our Hunting Fathers with Daniel Harding, Mozart’s Idomeneo with Sir Charles Mackerras, Janáček’s The Diary of One who Disappeared with Thomas Adès, Schubert with Leif Ove Andsnes, Mitsuko Uchida and Antonio Pappano, Noel Coward with Jeffrey Tate, Britten Orchestral cycles with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle, Wolf with Antonio Pappano, Bach cantatas with Fabio Biondi, Handel arias with Harry Bicket, Britten Canticles and both Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (Gramophone Award, 2003) and Billy Budd (Grammy Award, 2010), Adès’ The Tempest (Gramophone Award 2010) and Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Recent recordings include Schubert songs with Julius Drake for Wigmore Hall Live; Shakespeare songs (Grammy Award, 2017) and Requiem: The Pity of War with Antonio Pappano for Warner Classics and Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’Eté, Ravel’s Shéhérazade and Debussy’s Le Livre de Baudelaire arr. John Adams with Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

He has worked with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker, Chicago, Boston, London and BBC Symphony orchestras, the London, New York, Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestras and the Rotterdams Philharmonisch Orkest and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam under Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Colin Davis, Sir Andrew Davis, Seiji Ozawa, Antonio Pappano, Riccardo Muti, Mstislav Rostropovich, Daniel Barenboim, Daniel Harding and Donald Runnicles. He sang the world premiere of Henze Opfergang with the Accademia Santa Cecilia in Rome under Antonio Pappano.

His operatic appearances have included Lysander A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Opera Australia and at the Edinburgh Festival; Nerone L’Incoronazione di Poppea, Tom Rakewell and Male Chorus The Rape of Lucretia for the Bayerische Staatsoper; Don Ottavio for the Wiener Staatsoper; Tamino Die Zauberflöte, Aschenbach Death in Venice and Jupiter Semele for English National Opera; Peter Quint The Turn of the Screw, Don Ottavio Don Giovanni and Caliban Adès The Tempest for the Royal Opera House; Madwoman Curlew River in the Netia Jones staging for the London Barbican, which was also seen in New York and on the west coast of America; Peter Quint for the Teatro alla Scala and Handel’s Jeptha at the Opéra National de Paris.

Concert performances and other notable events have included the War Requiem with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski; Les Illuminations with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Andris Nelsons; European, American and Asian recital tours of Schubert’s Winterreise with Thomas Adès; Britten’s War Requiem with the Staatskapelle Berlin and Antonio Pappano and Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été with the Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot. His book Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize, 2016) was published by Faber and Faber in the UK and Knopf in the USA in 2014. In the 2018/19 season he took up a residency with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.

Recent engagements have included a European recital tour with jazz pianist Brad Mehldau which featured a new composition by Mehldau; a world premiere of a new commission by James MacMillan with the London Symphony Orchestra for the WW1 centenary, staged performances of the Zender Winterreise, directed by Netia Jones, in Shanghai, recordings of the three major Schubert song cycles live at the Wigmore Hall with pianists Lars Vogt and Thomas Adès, recital tours in Japan, Hong Kong and Korea, as well as a European concert tour with Europa Galante.

Highlights of the 2019/20 season included his return to the operatic stage at the Deutsche Oper as Aschenbach Death in Venice; a tour of the USA with Brad Mehldau; performances of Schubert’s Winterreise at the Cartagena Music Festival in Colombia and a concert tour with Lucerne Festival Strings through Slovenia and Italy. He will appear as Evangelist (Matthew Passion) in Torino and as Bajazet in Handel’s Tamerlano with the Moscow State Philharmonic.

He was a fellow in history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1992-5) and in 2001 was elected an honorary fellow of the college. In 2003 he was made an Honorary Doctor of Music by the University of St Andrews and in 2010 he was made an honorary fellow of St John’s College Oxford. He was made a CBE in the 2004 New Year’s Honours. In 2014 he was Humanitas Professor of Classical Music at the University of Oxford.