Kirill Petrenko and Janine Jansen with Brahms’ Violin Concerto

Janine Jansen
Brahms’ Violin Concerto

In this interview, Janine Jansen talks about her first collaboration with Kirill Petrenko, her deep connection with the music of Brahms, and his Violin Concerto as a work that bridges the scope of symphonic work and the intimacy of chamber music.

Biography

Kirill Petrenko

Kirill Petrenko has been chief conductor and artistic director of the Berliner Philharmoniker since the 2019/20 season. Born in Omsk in Siberia, he received his training first in his home town and later in Austria. He established his conducting career in opera with positions at the Meininger Theater and the Komische Oper Berlin. From 2013 to 2020, Kirill Petrenko was general music director of Bayerische Staatsoper. He has also made guest appearances at the world’s leading opera houses, including Wiener Staatsoper, Covent Garden in London, the Opéra national in Paris, the Metropolitan Opera in New York and at the Bayreuth Festival. Moreover, he has conducted the major international symphony orchestras – in Vienna, Munich, Dresden, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Rome, Chicago, Cleveland and Israel. Since his debut in 2006, a variety of programmatic themes have emerged in his work together with the Berliner Philharmoniker. These include work on the orchestra’s core Classical-Romantic repertoire, for example with symphonies by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms. Unjustly forgotten composers such as Josef Suk and Erich Wolfgang Korngold are another of Kirill Petrenko’s interests. Russian works are also highlighted, with performances of Tchaikovsky’s operas Mazeppa, Iolanta and The Queen of Spades attracting particular attention recently.

Janine Jansen

For Janine Jansen, music is an existential experience. This can be exhausting, she says, “but I want that intensity. As a musician, I always want to give everything, and never hold back.” Her playing is often described as having a vocal, speech-like quality, and she pays keen attention to the shaping of individual notes.  Janine Jansen was born in Soest, near Utrecht. At the age of 19, after completing her studies and making her debut at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam in 1997, she launched her international career. Her debut album was released in 2003, followed a year later by a recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons that became a worldwide success. Today she performs regularly with the world’s leading conductors and orchestras – including the Berliner Philharmoniker, with whom she made her Waldbühne debut in 2006. She is the orchestra's Artist in Residence this season. She has held a professorship at the Kronberg Academy since 2023, and she is the Artistic Director of the International Chamber Music Festival in Utrecht, which she founded in 2003. Janine Jansen has received numerous awards, among them the Dutch government's Johannes Vermeer Prize  in 2018 and the Herbert von Karajan Prize of the Salzburg Easter Festival in 2020. She plays a 1715 Stradivarius violin known as the “Shumsky Rode”, generously loaned to her by a European patron. She is a Pirastro artist and performs on Evah Pirazzi Neo strings.