Daniel Barenboim and Lisa Batiashvili

When eleven-year-old Daniel Barenboim witnessed Edwin Fischer conducting from the piano, he knew: "That's exactly what I want to do!" And so it was that the young pianist, who had already appeared in public at the age of seven in his native Buenos Aires, also embarked on a career as a conductor - as the youngest member of Igor Markevitch's conducting class. Daniel Barenboim made his conducting debut in 1967 and in the following years took on leading positions with the Orchestre de Paris, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and La Scala in Milan, before becoming General Music Director of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in 1992, a position he held until the beginning of last year. Together with the Palestinian-American literary scholar Edward Said, he founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which stands for tolerance and international understanding like no other ensemble. In 2015, he also founded the Berlin Barenboim-Said Academy, which promotes young musicians from the Middle East. Since his debut as a soloist in 1964 and as a conductor in 1969 with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Barenboim has enjoyed a decades-long artistic partnership with the orchestra, who made him an honorary member in 1992 and an honorary conductor in 2019,. "The Berliner Philharmoniker," he says, "was already a model for me as a child of what an orchestra could and should sound like."

Lisa Batiashvili's playing is acclaimed for its wonderful, nuanced tone, and the praise is well-founded. She says: "Many musicians think that the beauty of the sound is less important than the expression. You need that, too. But for me, the sound of the violin - like the human voice - reflects the soul of the musician." Lisa Batiashvili, who studied with Mark Lubotsky in Hamburg and Ana Chumachenco in Munich, is without a doubt one of the world's most renowned violinists. She regularly works with orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and has also been a regular guest with the Berliner Philharmoniker since 2004. The partnership will be further intensified in the 2023/24 season when Lisa Batiashvili appears as the orchestra's Artist-in-Residence, both as a soloist and as a chamber musician. The German-born Georgian musician, who received an honorary doctorate from the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts in Helsinki in 2018, set up her own foundation in 2021, in which she is committed to supporting young, highly talented Georgian musicians. Lisa Batiashvili plays a violin from 1739 by Joseph Guarneri "del Gesu". Her recordings - Secret Love Letters and City Lights are her most recent albums - have won numerous prizes, including the Echo Klassik and the Midem Classical Award.