Hannu Lintu is one of Finland’s most sought-after conductors and is rapidly creating an international career. He has been artistic director and chief conductor of the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra 2009–2013, and also principal guest conductor of the RTE National Symphony Orchestra in Dublin. Before assuming the new rôle of chief conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2013, he was the orchestra’s chief guest conductor in 2012. Hannu Lintu was previously chief conductor of the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra and artistic director of the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra. He is a regular guest conductor with the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra in Finland and was artistic director of the orchestra’s Summer Sounds Festival in 2005.

Hannu Lintu studied the cello, the piano, and subsequently conducting with Jorma Panula at the Sibelius Academy. He participated in masterclasses with Myung-Whun Chung at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Italy, and won first prize in the Nordic Conducting Competition in Bergen in 1994. He has appeared with the Cincinnati Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, St Louis Symphony, Toronto Symphony, City of Birmingham Symphony and Dallas Symphony orchestras, the Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, Orquesta Sinfonica de RTVE, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Taiwan, and the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Seoul Philharmonic and Royal Flemish Philharmonic orchestras. He has also conducted a cycle of the complete Beethoven Symphonies with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.

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Described by the Gramophone as ‘a pianist in full flower of his mature, imaginative artistry’ in 2022, Peter Jablonski is an award-winning internationally acclaimed Swedish artist. He is among the leading pianists of his generation, and during the last 30 years on international stages has performed with over 150 orchestras, given over 2,000 concerts, and has been on 25 tours of Japan. Discovered by Abbado and Ashkenazy and signed by Decca in his 17th year, he went on to perform, collaborate, and record with many of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, which include the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Kirov (now Mariinsky), La Scala Philharmonic, Tonhalle Zurich, Orchestre Nationale de France, NHK Tokyo, DSO Berlin, Warsaw Philharmonic, Philadelphia, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Cleveland Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Valery Gergiev, Andris Nelsons, Daniel Harding, Kurt Sanderling, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Riccardo Chailly, Daniele Gatti, and Myung-Whun Chung.

He has appeared in concert and recitals in famous venues around the world, which include the Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican in London, Philharmonie Berlin, Suntory Hall Tokyo, Hollywood Bowl Los Angeles, Salle Pleyel Paris, Musikverein Vienna, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, among many others.

He has performed and recorded the complete piano concertos by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, and Bartók, and all piano sonatas by Prokofiev. During his three-decade-long career he developed a diverse repertoire that includes works by Barber, Gershwin, Szymanowski, Lutosławski, Copland, Stenhammar, with most recent additions of such composers as Alexey Stanchinsky, Ronald Stevenson, and Grażyna Bacewicz.

He worked with composers Witold Lutosławski and Arvo Pärt, and had a number of works composed for, and dedicated to him, including Wojciech Kilar’s Piano Concerto, for which he won the Orpheus award for the world premiere performance at the Warsaw Autumn Festival. He remains a supporter of today’s composers and regularly gives world premieres of new works.

Jablonski’s extensive discography includes recordings he has made for Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, Altara, Octavia, and Ondine labels. He has received numerous  awards for his recordings, which include the Edison award for best concerto recording of Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto, Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and Lutoslawski’s Paganini Rhapsody with Ashkenazy and RPO for Decca. He was presented with the Gramophone Classical Music Award for his Deutsche Grammophone recording of works by Cécile Chaminade with Anne Sofie von Otter and Bengt Forsberg.

He maintains a busy recording schedule, and his collaboration with Ondine has produced a number of well-received recordings. His recording of solo piano works by Grażyna Bacewicz was awarded the French Académie Charles Cros Award in December 2022, and it has been listed among best classical music and best solo piano recordings of 2022 in the Gramophone. Peter Jablonski is the recipient of the Litteris et Artibus medal for his servvices to culture, granted to him by the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf. He is also the winner of the prestigious prize Årets Svensk i Världen (International Swedish Personality of the Year), receiving it before ABBA and Astrid Lindgren. In May 2022 he was elected into the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. In 2023, Jablonski became the global ambassador for Karol Szymanowski, in a multi-year project run by the Institute of Adam Mickiewicz and music publisher PWM, during which he will perform Szymanowski’s piano works around the world, starting with the Wigmore Hall recital in September 2024.

www.peterjablonski.com

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Christopher Ward studied at Oxford University and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 2003 he was awarded a fellowship at Scottish Opera and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow.

He was a member of the International Opera Studio at Zurich Opera before moving to the Staatstheater Kassel in 2005 as conductor and solo répétiteur. In 2006 he assisted Sir Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic during a production of Wagner’s Rheingold. In 2009 he became conductor and musical assistant to Kent Nagano at the Bavarian State Opera. He has appeared as a guest conductor at Hamburg State Opera, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein and Berlin’s Komische Oper. In 2018/19 he took over as conductor of a new production of Jörg Widmann’s Babylon at the Staatsoper Berlin. Since 2018 he has been general musical director of the city of Aachen.

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Cornelius Meister, born in Hanover in 1980, became principal conductor and artistic director of the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna in September 2010.

With the RSO Vienna he has held regular concerts in the Vienna Musikverein and the Vienna Konzerthaus. Extensive tours have taken him to Japan and throughout Europe, including to Salzburg Festival. Together with the RSO Vienna, he has been present on European radio, European television, on albums and in the internet.

From 2005 to 2012, Cornelius Meister was general director of music in Heidelberg. During this time he was awarded the ‘Prize for the Best Concert Programme’ by the German Federation of Music Publishers and the ‘Young Ears’ Prize and the Prize of the German Music Council for conveying music to children and adolescents in 2007 and 2010.

In concerts, Cornelius Meister also conducts Het Concertgebouworkest Amsterdam, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra Manchester, the Washington Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Orchestra dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia Rome, Sveriges Radios Symfoniorkester Stockholm, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris, the Ensemble intercontemporain Paris, the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin, the NDR Symphony Orchestra Hamburg and the Symphony Orchestra of Bavarian Radio.

At the age of 21, Cornelius Meister held his début at Hamburg State Opera, followed by débuts at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the New National Opera Tokyo, the San Francisco Opera, the German Opera in Berlin, the Theater an der Wien, the Latvian National Opera in Riga (Der Ring des Nibelungen), the Royal Opera in Copenhagen, the Semper Opera in Dresden, Zurich Opera and Vienna State Opera.

Cornelius Meister studied piano and conducting with Konrad Meister, Martin Brauss and Eiji Oue in Hanover and with Dennis Russel Davies, Jorge Rotter and Karl Kamper at Salzburg Mozarteum. He also plays the cello and the French horn. As a pianist, he has held concerts in Europe and the USA and is a prizewinner of the German Music Competition and the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival.

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