Janine Jansen's 1997 debut with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw signaled the rise of a major violin talent. Jansen wasn't well-known outside of the Netherlands until her 2002 London debut with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Vladimir Ashkenazy. Thereafter, invitations to appear with the leading European and American orchestras poured in, and in 2003, she was awarded the Dutch Music Prize, the highest artistic award given in the Netherlands. With a formidable technique and immaculate tone, fashioning her interpretations with both imagination and maturity, Jansen is regarded as one of her generation's foremost violinists. Her repertory is broad, taking in works by J.S. Bach, Vivaldi, and Beethoven and modern composers like Robert Helps and Richard Dubugnon. In 2021, Jansen was accompanied by Sir Antonio Pappano on the album 12 Stradivari, featuring Jansen performing on 12 of the legendary luthier's surviving violins.

Jansen was born in Soest, Netherlands, on January 7, 1978. She began lessons on the violin at six and had advanced studies at the University of Utrecht. Her list of teachers includes Philippe Hirschhorn, Coosje Wijzenbeek, and Boris Belkin. Following her 1997 Concertgebouw debut, Jansen slowly began building her career abroad. From 1998, she regularly took part in the Spectrum Concerts Berlin, a chamber music series of the Berlin Philharmonic, and in 2001, she performed the Brahms Violin Concerto, Op. 77, with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland. Jansen was a BBC New Generation Artist from 2002 until 2004. While her London debut with Ashkenazy in 2002 ushered in more concert opportunities, it also led to several successful recordings. In 2003, Jansen founded the International Chamber Music Festival Utrecht and has served as its guest artistic director since. In the 2007-2008 season, Jansen made impressive debuts with the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras, and in October 2009, she debuted with the Berlin Philharmonic in an acclaimed performance of the Britten Violin Concerto, Op. 15. Jansen's continued performances with the Concertgebouw earned her the Johannes Vermeer Prize from the Dutch government in 2018. She has been a violin professor at the Haute École de Musique Vaud Valais Fribourg since 2019.

Naxos issued her first album in 2003, a recording of works by John Harbison, and Decca followed in the two succeeding years with an album of various concert works simply called Janine Jansen and Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. While the latter recording generated some controversy, it became a digital best-seller and received an Echo Award in 2006. Two more Echo Awards followed for her Decca recordings of Mendelssohn and Bruch concertos (2007) and Beethoven and Britten concertos (2009). In 2011, Decca issued Jansen's first recital disc, Beau Soir, a collection of French works featuring accompaniment by pianist Itamar Golan. Jansen joined Martin Fröst, Lucas Debargue, and Torleif Thedéen for a 2017 Sony Classical recording of Messiaen's Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps. Jansen was brought to London in 2020 for a project dreamed up by violin dealer J&A Beare's managing director, Steven Smith, to play and record 12 of the surviving violins built by Antonio Stradivari. The logistics of Jansen's travel to London and transporting the near-priceless instruments during the coronavirus pandemic added additional difficulty to the project, but Jansen was able to spend time practicing with each instrument and chose a work that would optimally display the sound of each violin. The resulting album, 12 Stradivari, was released on Decca in 2021, with frequent collaborator Pappano as accompanist. The project was filmed by director Gerry Fox for the documentary Janine Jansen: Falling for Stradivari. ~ Robert Cummings & Keith Finke

Internationally known for his romantic music and his melodic gifts, Peter Tchaikovsky is sometimes regarded as the greatest Russian composer. His most noted works include Nutcracker Suite, Swan Lake and Symphony No. 4. Most of his compositions center around opera and theater.

Peter Tchaikovsky was born at Votkinsk to an inspector of mines and a half-French mother. As a child, Tchaikovsky was regarded as sensitive and as having morbid tendencies. (His morbid behavior only augmented after his mother died in 1854.) In 1852, he entered the School of Jurisprudence and became a clerk in the Ministry of Justice.

His musical career began at the age of 14 when he wrote his first composition. About 10 years later, Tchaikovsky studied harmony with Nikolay Zaremba, and in 1862, he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory and dedicated all his time to music. During his enrollment at the Conservatory, he studied orchestration with Anton Rubinstein and composed several overtures including one for the popular Alexander Ostrovsky's Storm. After studying at the Conservatory for four years, Tchaikovsky left to become a professor of harmony at a Conservatory in Moscow.

At the Moscow Conservatory, Tchaikovsky produced his first symphony, Winter Daydreams, and his first opera, The Voyevoda. Romeo and Juliet, one of Peter Tchaikovsky's most popular operas was at first a failure and did not achieve success until after several revisions were made in 1870 and 1880. During the 1870s Peter Tchaikovsky's musical genius began to shine. He produced his Second and Third Symphony, three string quartets, the Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, the Rococo Variations for Cello and Orchestra and two more operas, The Oprichnik and Vakula the Smith.

In 1877, Tchaikovsky befriended a wealthy widow who adored his music and supported him financially, but never wanted to meet him. With her financial support (which ceased in 1890), he quit his job at the Conservatory and devoted all his time to his compositions. Also in 1877, however, his personal life took a dramatic turn. His homosexuality causing him feelings of guilt, he decided to marry a 28-year-old former student of the Conservatory just to quiet rumors. While married Tchaikovsky attempted suicide, and the marriage ended when Tchaikovsky fled to St. Petersburg. (His wife died in 1917, after spending more than 20 years in an insane asylum.)

Between 1877 and 1890, Tchaikovsky devoted his time to composing all varieties of music including concertos, symphonies and operas. He produced three operas, The Maid of Orleans, Mazeppa and The Sorceress, as well as the Violin Concerto in D Major, the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Major and the Piano Trio in memory of Nicholas Rubenstein. Besides composing and adding to his many compositions, Tchaikovsky began touring as a conductor in 1888, with tours to Leipzig, Hamburg, Berlin, Prague, Paris and London. He orchestrated one of his most popular ballets, Sleeping Beauty, in 1889 and The Queen of Spades in 1890.

In 1891 Tchaikovsky made his first and last trip to the United States, performing in New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia. Realizing that he was more famous in Russia, he returned there to work on the ballad Voyevoda, the opera Iolanta and the famous ballet Nutcracker. He began composing his Sixth Symphony in B minor in early 1893. After a brief interruption to accept an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge, Tchaikovsky finished the Sixth Symphony in August and debuted in mid-October. After moderate success, he thought of renaming the symphony 'Pathetique.' Coincidentally, five days after the performance he became ill with cholera and died on November sixth in St. Petersburg.

Prime examples of wonderful and enlightening compositions, Peter Tchaikovsky's work became internationally famous because of its style and genius. He will always be regarded as one of the great composers. ~ Kim Summers

The Mahler Chamber Orchestra grew out of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and represents the vigor brought to the orchestral scene in recent years by European youth orchestras. The group has collaborated with pianist Yuja Wang and other world-class artists and has a substantial recording catalog.

The Mahler Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1997 at the initiative of Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra members and their conductor, Claudio Abbado; the new group was made up of musicians who wanted to continue to perform together after aging out of the youth orchestra. Its work has been marked by high technical standards and a commitment to an unusually broad repertoire ranging from Baroque to contemporary music and from chamber music to opera. To this end, the orchestra has enlisted and attracted a range of top-flight long-term collaborators, including veteran Baroque conductor Reinhard Goebel and Ligeti specialist Jonathan Nott.

The group has had long associations with two major festivals, backing a series of contemporary opera productions in Aix-en-Provence, France, beginning with Britten's The Turn of the Screw in 2001. That performance was led by Daniel Harding, a major figure in the orchestra's embrace of contemporary music; the orchestra made its recording debut in 2000 with Harding as conductor on a Virgin Classics recording of Mozart's Don Giovanni. Harding has served as the orchestra's principal guest conductor, music director, principal conductor, and conductor laureate. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra consists of 45 musicians from 20 different countries and gives between 60 and 70 concerts a year on five continents so far. Its organizational structure is notable; unlike most European ensembles, it is entirely privately financed. It may expand and contract according to the needs of the repertoire it performs, and it has no home base. Instead, it mounts tours on which it performs in various cities and holds rehearsals that serve as launching points for future concerts.

The Mahler Chamber Orchestra has also maintained a strong connection with the Lucerne Festival, where it has performed both as the core of the festival orchestra and under its own aegis. The orchestra has backed top soloists, including Cecilia Bartoli and Martha Argerich, and in 2009, appeared on an album by star tenor Jonas Kaufmann. It has recorded a cycle of Beethoven's piano concertos with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, whom it also backed on the multi-volume "Mozart Momentum" series. In 2017, it appeared on the Deutsche Grammophon double album Chopin Evocations. The 2017 season saw the group on tour with Wang, whom it had backed on the 2011 album Rachmaninov on Deutsche Grammophon. As of 2024, Daniele Gatti served as the orchestra's conductor and artistic advisor. The orchestra has recorded mostly for that label, Sony Classical (on the Andsnes albums), and Harmonia Mundi. By 2024, when it was led by conductor Pablo Heras-Casado on an album of works by Stravinsky and Falla, its recording catalog comprised some 100 releases. ~ James Manheim

Conductor Daniel Harding was a prodigy, earning worldwide renown while still in his teens. His early record of success continues in adulthood, with major conducting positions and a large catalog of recordings.

Harding was born in Oxford on August 31, 1975. Taking recorder lessons as a child, he attended Chetham's School of Music as a trumpeter and joined Britain's National Youth Orchestra at 13. The following year, Harding set his sights on a career as a conductor. He assembled an orchestra from among his fellow students, and when he was 17, he conducted them in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, not a simple score for a conductor. The performance went off well, and Harding brashly sent a tape to famed conductor Simon Rattle. Although at first, by his own testimony, Rattle thought Harding was crazy, but went to see a performance by the ambitious youngster and was favorably impressed. Harding became Rattle's assistant at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and made his debut in 1994 with that orchestra. Word got around about the precocious conductor's talents. He was hired by composer Hans Werner Henze to assist with preparations for the Munich Biennial Festival, and he took a conducting master class with Pierre Boulez.

For the 1995-1996 season, he became the assistant conductor of the legendary Berlin Philharmonic under Claudio Abbado. When scheduled conductor Franz Welser-Möst fell ill, Harding stepped in without rehearsal to lead the orchestra in a difficult program of music by Berlioz, Brahms, and Dvořák, earning critical acclaim and international attention. He became the youngest conductor ever to lead a BBC Proms Concert in 1996, and the following year his career was launched as he took on conducting positions at the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra in Norway and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie in Bremen, Germany. Leaving the latter group in 2003, he was appointed principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra the following year. Harding became the principal conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2007, remaining in that position as of the early 2020s. He also held chief conductor positions with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra from 2003 to 2011 (staying on as laureate) and with the Orchestre de Paris from 2015 to 2018. Harding held a variety of major guest conducting positions not only with orchestras but also at opera houses, including Italy's La Scala.

Harding has recorded prolifically with almost all of the orchestras with which he has been associated, issuing albums on Virgin, EMI, Harmonia Mundi, and other major labels. In 2020, he led the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in performances of Schoenberg's Violin Concerto and Verklärte Nacht, featuring violinist Isabelle Faust. In addition to his busy conducting schedule, Harding maintains his status as a licensed airline pilot, flying part-time for Air France as of the early 2020s. ~ James Manheim