Igor Levit won the ›2018 Gilmore Artist Award‹ and the Royal Philharmonic Society’s ›Instrumentalist of the Year 2018‹ award. The New York Times describes him as one of the »essential artists of our time«. He is Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Academy and of the Heidelberger Frühling Standpunkte Festival. In early 2019, he became Professor of Piano at his Alma Mater, Hannover College of Music, Drama and Media.

The 2019/20 season is, for Igor Levit, all about Beethoven’s piano sonatas, which he released on Sony Classical at its beginning. It also marks the start of three cycles of the complete sonatas – at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, at the Lucerne Festival and at the Konserthuset in Stockholm. To close the season, Levit is touring The States with a purely Beethoven programme which will see him play in locations such as Carnegie Hall in New York. At The Barbican in London, Igor Levit is the 2019/20 season’s ›Featured Artist‹. Alongside a tour with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, further engagements will follow, such as with the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig, the Cleveland Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Highlights of previous seasons include collaborations with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Staatskapelle Dresden as well as tours with the Bavarian State Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich.

Born in Nizhny Novgorod in 1987, Igor Levit moved to Germany with his family at the age of eight. He completed his degree in piano at Hannover where he obtained the highest possible score in the institute’s history. At home in Berlin, Levit plays a Steinway D concert grand – a gift from the ›Independent Opera at Sadler’s Wells‹ Foundation.

Grammy Award winner Paavo Järvi is one of the most internationally sought-after conductors of our time. Born in Tallinn, Estonia, he studied percussion and conducting at the Tallinn School of Music and continued his studies in the USA at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute with Leonard Bernstein.

Paavo Järvi has been Artistic Director of The Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen since 2004, making him the orchestra’s longest-serving principal conductor. Their joint successes with the Beethoven cycle are phenomenal. Among others, Paavo Järvi received the Echo Klassik 2010 Conductor of the Year award for his CD recording of Symphonies No. 2 and No. 6. His following project with The Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen, the symphonies of Robert Schumann, was as successful as the Beethoven Project. The Japanese Mostly Classics magazine effused: »Järvi’s Schumann is set to go down in Schumann concert history.« Together with The Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen, Paavo Järvi is now working on the Brahms cycle.

Paavo Järvi has been named Artist of the Year by the French magazine Diapason. This was the second major award in 2015 for Paavo Järvi who was also honoured with the same title in September by Gramophone Magazine in London.

Paavo Järvi is also Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris and Artistic Advisor to the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, the Pärnu Festival and the Järvi Academy. Furthermore, he is principal conductor of the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo. Guest conducting engagements regularly take him to leading orchestras such as the Berlin or Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam as well as American orchestras in New York, Cleveland and Chicago.