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Nikolai Lugansky is a pianist who combines elegance and grace with powerful virtuosity, a true incarnation of the Russian tradition on the international classical stage. Recognised as a master of Russian and late romantic repertoire, Lugansky is renowned for his interpretations of Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Chopin and Debussy. He has received numerous awards for recordings and artistic merit and regularly works with top level conductors such as Yuri Temirkanov, Kent Nagano, Mikhail Pletnev, Stanislav Kochanovsky, Gianandrea Noseda, and Vladimir Jurowski. Concerto highlights for the 2020/21 season include performances with Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg, BBC Symphony Orchestra in London, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, and Russian National Orchestra at Philharmonie de Paris, the Cleveland Orchestra and NHK in Tokyo. Lugansky also tours Europe with Malmö Symfoniorkester and Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. A regular recitalist the world over, during this season Lugansky appears in Paris, Prague, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Vienna Konzerthaus and Wigmore Hall in London. Lugansky regularly performs at the La Roque‑d’Anthéron Festival in France and will be at the Verbier Festival in Summer 2021.
In June 2019 Nikolai Lugansky received the Russian Federation National Award in Literature and Art, for his contribution to the development and advancement of Russian and international classical music culture over the past 20 years. Nikolai has won several awards for his many recordings. His recital CD featuring Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonatas won the Diapason d’Or, whilst his recording of concertos by Grieg and Prokofiev with Kent Nagano and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin was a Gramophone Editor’s Choice. Nikolai records for harmonia mundi; his most recent release ‘César Frank, Préludes, Fugues & Chorals’ (March 2020) won the Diapason d’Or.
Recently appointed Chief Conductor and Music Advisor of the Philadelphia Orchestra as well as Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Charles Dutoit regularly collaborates with the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and soloists.
Renowned for polished and idiomatic interpretations of an eclectic array of musical styles and since his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1980, Charles Dutoit has been invited each season to conduct other major orchestras of the United States, including those of Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Pittsburgh.
He has also performed regularly with all the great orchestras of Europe, including the Berlin Philharmonic and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra as well as with all the London orchestras, the major orchestras of Japan, South America and Australia.
Charles Dutoit has recorded extensively for Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, EMI, Philips, CBS, Erato among other labels with American, European and Japanese orchestras. His more than 170 recordings, half of them with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, have garnered over 40 awards and distinctions around the world.
For 25 years (1977 to 2002) Charles Dutoit was Artistic Director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, a dynamic musical partnership recognized the world over.
He has also been closely associated with the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1990 as Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Orchestra’s summer festival at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York and he led the Orchestra in a series of distinctive recordings.
From 1991 to 2001, Charles Dutoit was Music Director of the Orchestre National de France with which he made a number of critically lauded recordings, and toured extensively on the five continents. In 1998, he was appointed Music Director of the NHK Symphony Orchestra (Tokyo) with which he has toured Europe, the United States, China and Southeast Asia and is today Music Director Emeritus of the Orchestra.
When still in his early 20’s, Charles Dutoit was invited by Von Karajan to lead the Vienna State Opera. He has since conducted regularly at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera, New York and the Deutsche Oper, Berlin. He also led a highly acclaimed new production of Berlioz’s masterpiece Les Troyens at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera.
In 2003, he began a series of Wagner operas – Der fliegende Holländer and the complete Ring Cycle – at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.
Artistic Director for three seasons of the Sapporo Pacific Music Festival, Charles Dutoit is presently Artistic Director of the Miyazaki International Music Festival in Japan as well as Artistic Director of the Canton International Summer Music Academy (CISMA) in Guangzhou (Canton), China which he founded in 2005.
Charles Dutoit also participated in a series of educational documentary films entitled Cities of Music produced by the NHK Television of Tokyo and which features ten musical capitals of the world.
In 1991, Charles Dutoit was made Honorary Citizen of the City of Philadelphia. In 1995, the government of Québec named him Grand Officier de l’Ordre national du Québec and in 1996, he was invested as Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France. He is the recipient of two awards by the Canadian Conference of the Arts and in 1998, Charles Dutoit was invested as Honorary Officer of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest award of merit whose other honorary recipients include John Kenneth Galbraith, James Hillier, Nelson Mandela, The Queen Mother, Vaclav Havel and Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
Charles Dutoit was born in Lausanne, Switzerland and his extensive musical training included history of music, composition, violin, viola, piano and percussion at the conservatoires of Geneva, Siena, Venice and Boston. A globetrotter motivated by his passion for history and archaeology, political science, art and architecture, Charles Dutoit has traveled in all 195 nations of the world. He maintains residences in Switzerland, Paris, Montreal, Buenos Aires and Tokyo.
English by birth, Christian Thompson worked in London as an agent representing prominent musicians for three companies in London. He left London in 2005 to become Director of the Verbier Festival Academy in Switzerland, where he played an important role in nurturing and developing many extraordinary young artists who now have international careers.
In 2014, he was appointed Délégué Artistique at the Auditorium de Lyon, a 2000 seat concert hall with its own resident orchestra, the Orchestre national de Lyon with Music Director Leonard Slatkin.
Four years later, Christian moved to Stockholm to become Head of Artistic Planning for Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Music Director Daniel Harding), Swedish Radio Choir and Baltic Sea Festival, all under the umbrella of Swedish Radio’s concert hall, Berwaldhallen.
He has remained committed to helping and advising the next generation of musicians and, in 2019, was Director of the Tsinandali Festival Academy in its inaugural year.
Charlotte Gardner is a music critic and journalist regularly to be found in specialist music publications including The Strad, Gramophone (where she specialises in strings and Baroque) and Classical Music magazine, and writing concert programme notes for organisations including the BBC and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Before turning to writing, Charlotte spent eight years at the BBC working across live and pre-recorded radio and television, beginning on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune and spending her final few years in News, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She holds a Music MA from the University of Cambridge.
French violinist Renaud Capuçon is firmly established internationally as a major soloist, recitalist and chamber musician. He is known and loved for his poise, depth of tone and virtuosity, and he works with the world’s most prestigious orchestras, artists, venues and festivals.
Born in Chambéry in 1976, Renaud Capuçon began his studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris at the age of fourteen, winning numerous awards during his five years there. Following this, Capuçon moved to Berlin to study with Thomas Brandis and Isaac Stern and was awarded the Prize of the Berlin Academy of Arts. In 1997, he was invited by Claudio Abbado to become concert master of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, which he led for three summers, working with conductors including Boulez, Ozawa, Welser-Möst and Claudio Abbado.
Since then, Capuçon has established himself as a soloist at the very highest level. He performs with leading orchestras such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, Vienna Philharmonic (VPO), London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Orchestre National de France, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Filarmonica della Scala, Boston Symphony and New York Philharmonic. His many conductor relationships include Gergiev, Barenboim, Bychkov, Dénève, Dohnanyi, Dudamel, Eschenbach, Haitink, Harding, Paavo Järvi, Nelsons, Nézet-Seguin, Roth, Shani, Ticciati, van Zweden and Long Yu.
A great commitment to chamber music has led him to collaborations with Argerich, Angelich, Barenboim, Bashmet, Bronfman, Buniatishvili, Grimaud, Hagen, Ma, Pires, Trifonov and Yuja Wang, as well as with his brother, cellist Gautier Capuçon, and have taken him, among others, to the Berlin, Lucerne, Verbier, Aix-en-Provence, Roque d’Anthéron, San Sebastián, Stresa, Salzburg, Edinburgh International and Tanglewood festivals. Capuçon has also represented France at some of the world’s most prestigious international events: he has performed with Yo-Yo Ma under the Arc de Triomphe for the official commemoration of Armistice Day in the presence of more than 80 heads of state, and played for world leaders at the G7 Summit in Biarritz.
Capuçon is the Artistic Director of two festivals, the Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad, since 2016, and the Easter Festival in Aix-en-Provence, which he founded in 2013. From the 2021/22 season, Capuçon is also the Artistic Director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne; his first set of recordings with the ensemble entitled ‘Tabula Rasa’, released in September 2021, is an album devoted to the music of Arvo Pärt.
Capuçon has built an extensive discography and records exclusively with Erato/Warner Classics. Recent releases include a recording of Bartok’s two violin concerti with the LSO / Roth, Brahms and Berg with the VPO / Harding, and chamber music of Debussy. His latest recording, ‘Au Cinema’, featuring much loved selections from film music, releases in October 2018. His latest album ‘Un violin à Paris’, recorded with Guillaume Bellom and released in November 2021, features a large range of shorter works arranged for violin and piano.
In 2017, Capuçon founded a new ensemble, the Lausanne Soloists, comprised of current and former students of the Haute École de Musique de Lausanne, where he has held a professorship since 2014. He plays the Guarneri del Gesù ‘Panette’ (1737), which belonged to Isaac Stern. In June 2011 he was appointed ‘Chevalier dans l’Ordre National du Mérite’ and in March 2016 ‘Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur’ by the French Government.
Ivry Gitlis is one of the most popular violinists of his time. He has succeeded in combing the integrity of a demanding musical career with original and renewed artistic experiences.
Originally from Ukraine, Ivry Gitlis’ parents settled in Israel in 1921. Ivry Gitlis was born a year later in Haifa. His parents were not musicians yet encouraged musical development in their son by offering him his first violin. His progress was prodigious. He studied with Ms. Velikovsky, (a pupil of Adolf Busch) and gave his first concert at the age of seven. Concerned about completing his musical education, Ivry Gitlis settled in France and was admitted to the Conservatoire in Jules Boucherit’s class. With his diploma under his belt, he decided to perfect his tuition with Georges Enesco, Carl Flesch and Jacques Thibaud.
Once the armistice was signed, Ivry Gitlis gave his debut with the London Phiharmonic Orchestra. While Glenn Gould inaugurated the return of artistic relations between Canada and the USSR in the middle of the 1950s, Ivry Gitlis was, in 1963, the first Israeli violinist to play in a country who often forced its own artists into exile. Ivry Gitlis gave his first tours of the United States with Eugene Ormandy and Georges Szell and recorded the great concertos of his century, (from Berg to Bartok via Sibelius).
Ivry Gitlis then chose to settle in Paris, a city in which his notoriety grew considerably. However, this fame did not in any way distance him from what was most essential. On the contrary, he was impassioned by the music of his era and interpreted pieces written for him like the Pezze per Ivry by Bruno Maderna while promoting the music of Xenakis. Ivry Gitlis is one of a handful of people who bear witness to the exchange made possible through music through his encounters with audiences from all horizons in every continent. He is familiar with numerous musical styles and travels with ease from one to the other founding festivals and encountering all different types of audiences. For this ingenious violinist who also paints and writes, music is not music without communication and immediate sharing.
The first mandolin soloist to be nominated for a classical Grammy, Avi Avital has been compared to Andres Segovia for his championship of his instrument and to Jascha Heifitz for his incredible virtuosity. Passionate and “explosively charismatic” (New York Times) in live performance, he is a driving force behind the reinvigoration of the mandolin repertory.
He has commissioned over 100 works for the mandolin including concertos for mandolin and orchestra by Anna Clyne, Jennifer Higdon, Avner Dorman, David Bruce and Giovanni Sollima which he has performed with orchestras and conductors such as the Munich Philharmonic with Krzysztof Urbański, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Robert Spano, Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI and Ryan Bancroft and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Daniele Rustioni.
Highlights of the 2022/23 season see performances of the Mandolin Concertos by Jennifer Higdon, Anna Clyne and Giovanni Sollima commissioned for Avital, alongside tours with the Academy of Sat Martin in the Fields, Il Giardino Armonico with Giovanni Antonini, B’Rock and Arcangelo, duo recitals with Ksenija Sidorova (accordion), Olga Pashchenko (harpsichord/fortepiano) and Omer Klein (piano), and a tour of Australia with cellist Giovanni Sollima. Avital launches his new venture, the “Between Worlds Ensemble” with a three-part residency at the Boulez Saal in Berlin. The ensemble was formed to explore different genres, cultures and musical worlds focusing on different geographical regions and in its first year will feature traditional, classical and folk music from the Iberian Peninsula, Black Sea and Italy.
Avi Avital collaborates with musicians across many genres including Mahan Esfahani, Kristian Bezuidenhout, Alice Sara Ott, Andreas Scholl, the Dover Quartet, the Danish String Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Omer Klein, Omer Avital, actress Martina Gedeck and Georgian puppet theatre Budrugana Gagra. His versatility has led to features as “Portrait Artist” at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, BOZAR in Brussels and the Dortmund Konzerthaus (Zeitinsel). He is a regular presence at major festivals such as Aspen, Salzburg, Tanglewood, Spoleto, Ravenna, MISA Shanghai, Cheltenham, Verbier and Tsinandali.
An exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist, his sixth album for the label “The Art of the Mandolin” has been received with high praise and top reviews in The Times, Independent, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine as well as the international press. Previous recordings “Bach” (2019), “Avital meets Avital” (2017), “Vivaldi” (2015), an album of Avital’s own transcriptions of Bach concertos (2012) and “Between Worlds” (2014) also received numerous awards.
Born in Be’er Sheva in southern Israel, Avital began learning the mandolin at the age of eight and soon joined the flourishing mandolin youth orchestra founded and directed by his charismatic teacher, Russian-born violinist Simcha Nathanson. He studied at the Jerusalem Music Academy and the Conservatorio Cesare Pollini in Padua with Ugo Orlandi. Winner of Israel’s prestigious Aviv Competitions in 2007, Avital is the first mandolinist in the history of the competition to be so honoured. He plays on a mandolin made by Israeli luthier Arik Kerman.
Sophie Ellen Frank is the creator of the educational concept and artistic director of the Opera Academy. Born in 1963 in Osaka, Japan, Sophie Ellen Frank made her debut at the age of four in the role of the child in Madame Butterfly at the Grand Théâtre de Genève in the arms of Dame Gwyneth Jones. She went on to sing as a member and soloist of the children’s choir in Turandot, Carmen, Wozzeck, Les Troyens and Der Wildschütz in Geneva and Darmstadt. From backstage, she observed her mother, Nicole Buloze, then a world-renowned dancer, choreographer and singer. Sophie studied violin and cello, classical dance and theatre at the conservatories in Darmstadt and Basel.
After her commercial and aviation safety training in Geneva, she continued her singing studies at the Conservatoire and the Ecole d’Opéra from 1987 to 1992. She worked with Gabriel Bacquier, José van Dam, Régine Crespin, Gloria Davy, Nancy Long, Kammersängerin Christa Ludwig, Sena Jurinac, Gert Krämer. Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro was her first major role, and she has since performed, among others, Cherubino, Dorabella, Donna Elvira, Rosalinde, Sesto, Rosina, Haensel and Orlovsky in Geneva, Frankfurt, Lyon and Zurich.
She has produced and directed numerous events in Geneva such as the Italian Opera Week, the Russian Music Week, and Rossini’s Inganno Felice with Sonja Yoncheva.
Paul Hess is the President of the Académie de l’opera Association (Geneva), its conductor and musical director. He is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, the Mozarteum in Salzburg and the Academia Chigiana in Siena, Italy. He is a laureate of the Besançon International Conducting Competition and a recipient of a Fullbright Scholarship in Italy. He studied conducting with the Masters: Michael Tilson Thomas, Sir Charles Mackerras, Rafael Kubelik, Stanley Pope, Franco Ferrara, Boris Goldovsky, and conducted concerts and operas in Boston, Salzburg, Buffalo, Rome, Siena, Bologna, Treviso, San Remo, Trapani, Besançon, Geneva, Basel and Bern, and prestigious orchestras such as the OSR, OCG, OCL, BBC. He is also a regular member of the jury for international opera competitions.
Paul Hess is also a cartoonist and humorous portraitist. His drawings have been published in various specialised music magazines, including Il Mondo de la Musica (Rome) and Clavier (United States). He has been exhibited at the Rome Opera (100 drawings), at Victoria Hall in Geneva, at the B. F. M. in Geneva, at the Radio Suisse Romande in Lausanne, at the Télévision Suisse Romande in Geneva and at the G.A.T.T. in Geneva.
His career as a musical director; symphonic orchestras, ballets, operas, operettas, musicals, choirs, and his talent as a draughtsman and his pedagogical abilities, lead him today quite naturally towards teaching and passing on knowledge and expertise to new generations.