For decades, Elisabeth Leonskaja has been one of the most celebrated pianists of our time. Born in Tbilissi, she left the Soviet Union for Austria in 1978 and celebrated the start of her great career with an acclaimed concert at the Salzburg Festival. Since then, she has performed worldwide as a soloist with leading orchestras and conductors and has given solo recitals in all of Europe’s major concert halls. She has enjoyed a close artistic relationship with The Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen for many years.

Leonskaja’s early musical development was particularly influenced by her collaboration with her mentor Sviatoslav Richter, with whom she remained friends until his death in 1997. She also enjoyed a long-standing musical friendship with the Alban Berg Quartet. Their joint recordings are considered iconic. In addition to the numerous awards she has received for her extensive discography, this pianist was honoured with the International Classical Music Award (ICMA) for her life’s work in 2020. More recently, she received the Wigmore Hall Medal in London in 2024.  Her latest solo album is dedicated to the Second Viennese School. In 2025, she released Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto, ›Emperor‹.

Estonian conductor and Grammy Award winner Paavo Järvi has been Artistic Director of The Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen, his only German orchestra, since 2004. One highlight of the collaboration were the celebrated concerts of the Beethoven cycle, which received critical acclaim worldwide. Järvi received numerous awards for the recordings, including the ›Echo Klassik‹ as ›Conductor of the Year‹ and the prestigious ›Annual Prize of the German Record Critics‹.

Following the Beethoven project, he and the orchestra tackled the symphonic works of Schumann and Brahms, which received similarly enthusiastic reviews. Paavo Järvi is also Principal Conductor of the NHK Symphony Orchestra, Artistic Advisor to the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and the Järvi Summer Festival in Pärnu, Estonia, and since 2019/20 Artistic Director of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich. He regularly makes appearances as guest conductor with orchestras such as the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic orchestras, the Staatskappelle Dresden and the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago and the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. In 2015, he was named ›Artist of the Year‹ by the renowned British magazine Gramophone and the French magazine Diapason. In 2019, he received the ›Opus Klassik‹ as ›Conductor of the Year‹.