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Mikko Franck is one of the leading European conductors of his generation. He has become a major figure on the concert stage, as well as in the opera pit, etching out one of the most successful conducting careers ever achieved by an artist before reaching the age of 30. His repertory is broad, encompassing operas by Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky, and Puccini, and concert works by Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Rautavaara, and many others.

Franck was born on April 1, 1979 in Helsinki, Finland, the youngest of five children. His father was a pianist. Mikko began study of the violin at the age of 5 and at 13 entered the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki as one of its most precocious students. He took further music instruction in Sweden, New York, and Israel. In 1995, at 16, he tried his hand at conducting (a Haydn symphony), and afterward decided to take up the baton. Initially, he took private lessons from Jorma Panula, then two years later had further studies in conducting at the Sibelius Academy, earning his diploma in just a year.

By 2002, Franck had conducted many orchestras in his native Finland, as well as several important ones abroad, including the Philharmonia, the London Symphony, and the Israel Philharmonic and Munich Philharmonic orchestras. In September 2002, he was appointed music director and chief conductor of the Belgian National Orchestra. That same year, his first recording was released on the Ondine label, Sibelius' En Saga and Lemminkäinen Legends, which received a Grammy nomination.

In 2004 Franck accepted the appointment of music director of the Finnish National Opera, beginning in 2006 and remaining there until 2013. With his career in meteoric ascent, he began to experience an unusual problem for a young conductor -- frequent cancellations. To cite one of the most prominent, he missed two dates with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 2004. The reason -- Franck had suffered a knee injury playing soccer at 12, and while that affliction healed over time, it forced him to overcompensate on his right side during certain activity, leading to back problems.

Franck's career, however, has hardly been derailed, since he has remained in great demand: the New York Philharmonic -- as well as other major orchestras -- has offered further invitations. He was music director of the Belgian National Orchestra between 2002 and 2007. In 2015, he succeeded Myung-Whun Chung as director of Radio France's Philharmonic. Franck has remained a familiar figure in the recording studio, as well, with efforts like his Rautavaara collection, entitled Book of Visions (2006), also on Ondine.

Soprano Asmik Grigorian has excelled in operatic roles from several national traditions and of multiple voice types. She issued her solo recording debut, an album of Rachmaninov songs, in 2022.

Grigorian was born in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius on May 12, 1981. Her father, Gegham Grigoryan, was a tenor from Armenia, and her mother was Lithuanian soprano Irena Milkevičiūtė. Her brother, Vartan Grigorian, is a noted conductor. Asmik attended the National M. K. Čiurlionis School of Art in Vilnius, graduating in 1999. She went on to the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, earning a master's degree in 2006 while married to opera singer Giedrius Žalys and raising a small son. (She later married director Vasily Barkhatov and had a daughter in 2016.) Grigorian made well-regarded debut appearances in Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia (at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg) before performing in what became trademark Tchaikovsky roles at the Theater an der Wien and the Komische Oper Berlin in the early 2010s.

An award as Best Newcomer at the International Opera Awards in London in 2016 spread Grigorian's reputation, and that year, she appeared on the album Dmitri Hvorostovsky Sings of War, Peace, Love and Sorrow. Grigorian made her debut appearance at the Salzburg Festival in 2017, singing the role of Marie in Berg's Wozzeck. The next several years brought appearances at various major European houses, including Oper Frankfurt (in the title role in Puccini's Manon Lescaut) in 2019-2020, and the Wiener Staatsoper, the Mariinsky Theatre, and the Deutsche Oper Berlin as Cio-Cio San in Puccini's Madama Butterfly. Several major debuts were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Grigorian bounced back with appearances during 2021-2022 that included the Royal Opera House in London (in Janáček's Jenufa) and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow (as Strauss' Salome). She also performed that season at the AIDS-Stiftung Gala in Berlin. Signed to the Alpha label, she released her debut solo album, Dissonances, in 2022; on that recital of songs by Rachmaninov, she was backed by pianist Lukas Geniušas. ~ James Manheim

Baritone Matthias Goerne has been noted for his interpretations of German lieder and orchestral song. He has also had success in a variety of operatic roles, both mainstream and contemporary, and not all of them in German.

Goerne was born in Weimar, then in East Germany, on March 31, 1967. He sang youth roles with the Weimar City Opera. Goerne studied in Leipzig with Hans-Joachim Beyer, and then with the cream of the German lieder singers of the day, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and took several major competition prizes before singing in Bach's St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244, under legendary conductor Kurt Masur in 1990. He made his operatic debut in 1992 in Cologne, in Hans Werner Henze's opera Der Prinz von Homburg. Another break was a prominent substitute appearance, in Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn, for the ailing Fischer-Dieskau, in 1997. He has often sung vocal parts in works by Mahler.

A cast member at the Dresden Staatsoper for many years, Goerne has appeared increasingly often at other houses. He made his Covent Garden debut as Wozzeck in Berg's opera of the same name in 2002, and the role of Marcello in Puccini's La bohème, in Italian, is part of his repertory. Goerne was an artist-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic for the 2018-2019 season, and in 2019 he made return visits to the Salzburg Festival in Austria. Goerne has performed many recitals devoted to the German lied, and among his major recording projects is a 12-volume Schubert edition that appeared on the Harmonia Mundi label between 2008 and 2014.

Goerne's recording catalog is large and includes albums on Decca, Hyperion, and other labels, in addition to Harmonia Mundi. As his voice has deepened, he has essayed Wagnerian roles and issued the album The Wagner Project in 2017. On Harmonia Mundi, he was heard on a recording of Brahms' A German Requiem, Op. 45, in 2019, with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Also, in 2019, he released an album of Schumann lieder with Leif Ove Andsnes that was nominated for a Grammy award. ~ James Manheim