© Ranald Mackechnie

The London Symphony Orchestra
From delivering artistic excellence on stage, in recordings and on film, to its world-leading music education and community programme, the London Symphony Orchestra strives to bring great music to as many people as possible. Established in 1904, the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) was one of the first self-governing orchestras, built on the values of partnership and artistic ownership. That entrepreneurial spirit continues today.
 
The LSO has been the Resident Orchestra at the Barbican Centre in the City of London since it opened in 1982. Every year, it gives over 70 concerts in London and performs 50–60 worldwide. The LSO also programmes concerts and workshops at LSO St Luke’s through its pioneering community and education programme, LSO Discovery, one of the first in the UK. The Orchestra is a champion for new music, regularly commissioning some of the foremost British composers to write significant new works for full orchestra whilst also working to develop the UK’s younger generation of conductors.
 
The LSO has developed a close family of artists who continually demonstrate their commitment to this Orchestra, with Sir Simon Rattle as Music Director, Gianandrea Noseda and François-Xavier Roth as Principal Guest Conductors and Michael Tilson Thomas as Conductor Laureate. It also enjoys long-standing relationships with some of the world’s greatest conductors and soloists who relish the boundless musical ambition that the LSO offers.
 
The LSO has a history of innovation that helps to keep it relevant and contemporary. With the formation of its own recording label LSO Live in 1999, the Orchestra brought about a revolution in how live orchestral music is recorded and disseminated. Since then, LSO Live has produced over 150 releases and continually embraces new digital technologies, with pioneering moves into digital film, Blu-Ray Audio, downloads and streaming. The LSO has more recordings to its name than any other orchestra, and many millions have enjoyed the Orchestra through its leading work for film, which includes hundreds of classic scores from Star Wars to The King’s Speech, The Shape of Water and Indiana Jones.
 
The LSO seeks to bring live orchestral music to millions of people each year through performances in London and around the world. The LSO is supported by public funding through the Arts Council and the City of London Corporation for its residency at the Barbican Centre, who together with its strategic partners in the private sector enable it to continue delivering a dynamic range of work.
 

© Mark Allan-Oliver-Helbig

Conductor: Sir Simon Rattle
Sir Simon Rattle was born in Liverpool and studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London. From 1980 to 1998, Sir Simon was Principal Conductor and Artistic Adviser of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and was appointed Music Director in 1990. He moved to Berlin in 2002 and held the positions of Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker until he stepped down in 2018. Sir Simon became Music Director of the London Symphony Orchestra in September 2017 and spent the 2017-18 season at the helm of both ensembles.
 
From 2013, Sir Simon took up residency at Baden-Baden Osterfestspiele performing Die Zauberflöte and a series of concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker in his first season. Since then the partnership led to performances of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, Peter Sellars’s ritualization of Bach’s St. John Passion, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and most recently, Parsifal in 2018. For Salzburg Osterfestspiele, Rattle has conducted staged productions of Fidelio, Così fan tutte, Peter Grimes, Pelléas et Mélisande, Salome and Carmen, a concert performance of Idomeneo and many contrasting concert programmes. He has also conducted Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen with the Berliner Philharmoniker for Festival d'Aix-en-Provence and Salzburg Osterfestspiele and most recently at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and Wiener Staatsoper. Other recent opera productions for Sir Simon include Pelléas et Mélisande and Dialogues des Carmélites for the Royal Opera House; L'Étoile, Aus einem Totenhaus, Káťa Kabanová and La damnation de Faust for the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin, and Andrew Norman’s A Trip to the Moon at the Barbican Centre, London.
 
Sir Simon has longstanding relationships with the leading orchestras in London, Europe and the USA; initially working closely with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Boston Symphony Orchestra, and more recently with The Philadelphia Orchestra. He regularly conducts the Wiener Philharmoniker, with whom he has recorded the complete Beethoven symphonies and piano concertos with Alfred Brendel and is also a Principal Artist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Founding Patron of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.
 
Sir Simon has made over 70 recordings for EMI record label (now Warner Classics) and has received numerous prestigious international awards for his recordings on various labels. Releases on EMI include Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms (which received the 2009 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance) Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Ravel’s L'enfant et les sortileges, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. From 2014 Sir Simon continued to build his recording portfolio with the Berliner Philharmoniker’s new in-house label, Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings, which led to recordings of the Beethoven, Schumann and Sibelius symphony cycles. Sir Simon’s most recent recordings include Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Turnage’s Remembering, and Ravel, Dutilleux and Delage on Blue-Ray & DVD with the London Symphony Orchestra’s record label, LSO Live.
 
Music education is of supreme importance to Sir Simon, and his partnership with the Berliner Philiharmoniker broke new ground with the education programme Zukunft@Bphil, earning him the Comenius Prize, the Schiller Special Prize from the city of Mannheim, the Golden Camera and the Urania Medal. He and the Berliner Philharmoniker were also appointed International UNICEF Ambassadors in 2004 - the first time this honour has been conferred on an artistic ensemble. Sir Simon has also been awarded several prestigious personal honours which include a knighthood in 1994, becoming a member of the Order of Merit from Her Majesty the Queen in 2014 and most recently, was bestowed the Order of Merit in Berlin in 2018. In 2019, Sir Simon will be given the Freedom of the City of London.
 
During the 2018-19 season Sir Simon will embark upon tours to Japan, South Korea and Europe with the London Symphony Orchestra. He will conduct the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra for the first time in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and will return to the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin for Hippolyte et Aricie, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks for Die Walküre and the Deutsche Oper for Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. In March 2019, he conducts Peter Sellars’ revival of the St. John Passion with both the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
 

© Lisa Marie Mazzucco

Piano: Emanuel Ax
Born in Lvov, Poland, Emanuel Ax moved to Winnipeg, Canada, with his family when he was a young boy. His studies at the Juilliard School were supported by the sponsorship of the Epstein Scholarship Program of the Boys Clubs of America, and he subsequently won the Young Concert Artists Award. Additionally, he attended Columbia University, where he majored in French. Emanuel captured public attention in 1974 when he won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv and in 1979 he won the coveted Avery Fisher Prize in New York.
 
In partnership with colleagues Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma, he begins the current season with concerts in Vienna, Paris and London with the trios of Brahms recently released by SONY Classical. In the US he returns to the orchestras in Cleveland, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Washington, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Nashville and Portland, OR, and to Carnegie Hall for a recital to conclude the season. In Europe he returns to the Rotterdam Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and the radio orchestras of Hamburg, Hannover and Munich, as well as touring with the Budapest Festival Orchestra to Belgium, France and Italy. Emanuel will also appear in recital throughout Europe, culminating in a special concert with Sir Simon Keenlyside and the Dover Quartet at Wigmore Hall in June 2019.
 
Always a committed exponent of contemporary composers, with works written for him by John Adams, Christopher Rouse, Krzysztof Penderecki, Bright Sheng, and Melinda Wagner already in his repertoire, most recently he has added HK Gruber's Piano Concerto and Samuel Adams' Impromptus.
 
A Sony Classical exclusive recording artist since 1987, recent releases include Mendelssohn Trios with Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, Strauss' Enoch Arden narrated by Patrick Stewart, and discs of two-piano music by Brahms and Rachmaninoff with Yefim Bronfman. In 2015 Deutche Grammophon released a duo recording with Itzhak Perlman of Sonatas by Fauré and Strauss, which the two artists presented on tour during the 2015/2016 season. Emanuel has received GRAMMY® Awards for the second and third volumes of his cycle of Haydn's piano sonatas. He has also made a series of Grammywinning recordings with Yo-Yo Ma of the Beethoven and Brahms sonatas for cello and piano. His other recordings include the concertos of Liszt and Schoenberg, three solo Brahms albums, an album of tangos by Astor Piazzolla, and the premiere recording of John Adams's Century Rolls with the Cleveland Orchestra for Nonesuch. In the 2004/05 season Emanuel also contributed to an International EMMY® Award-Winning BBC documentary commemorating the Holocaust that aired on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
 
A frequent and committed partner for chamber music, he has worked regularly with such artists as Young Uck Kim, ChoLiang Lin, Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Peter Serkin, Jaime Laredo, and the late Isaac Stern.
 
Emanuel lives in New York with his wife, the pianist Yoko Nozaki, and they have two children, Joseph and Sarah. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary Doctorates of music from Yale and Columbia Universities.