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Gianandrea Noseda has developed a well-deserved reputation as a conductor who has mastered a wide range of both symphonic and stage music. He has conducted operas at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, as well as at other major operatic venues across the globe, and he is one of the most prolific conductors of the 21st century.

Noseda was born in Milan on April 23, 1964. He first studied piano, then later focused on composition and conducting. His teachers included Valery Gergiev, Myung-Whun Chung, and Donato Renzetti. In 1994, Noseda won two prestigious conducting competitions, the first in Douai, France, and the latter in Cadaques, Spain. Following his win in Cadaques, he was named the principal conductor of the Cadaqués Orchestra. His official debut followed shortly when he led the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi. With this ensemble, he made his first recording (1995), a disc of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, and other guitar works with soloist Emanuele Segre for the Claves label.

In 1997, upon the initiative of Gergiev, Noseda was made principal guest conductor at the Mariinsky Theater, the first foreigner to be given this honor. In 2002, Noseda made his debut at the Met conducting Prokofiev's War and Peace and was appointed principal conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. One of his early recordings, featuring Dvořák's Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88, came the same year with that group. He held this position until 2006 when his title was changed to chief conductor, a post he held until 2011. That year, he was named the principal guest conductor of the Israel Philharmonic.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Noseda emerged as one of the top operatic conductors on the British scene and beyond, with muscular, often hyper-dramatic interpretations that drew audiences. His work was amply captured on recordings, with a video of Gounod's Faust appearing in 2016, with the Orchestra e Coro Teatro Regio Torino, and one of Bizet's The Pearl Fishers at the Met in 2017. Noseda made a series of high-profile appearances conducting vocal recitals by four of the world's top singers: Ildebrando d'Arcangelo, Rolando Villazón, Anna Netrebko, and Diana Damrau. In 2016, Noseda was named the principal guest conductor of the London Symphony, and the following year, he was named the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. In 2018, he was named the general music director of the Zurich Opera House, beginning with the 2021-2022 season.

Noseda has made numerous recordings for a variety of labels, including Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Philips, and Chandos. His most popular recordings include the best-selling 2003 solo debut of soprano arias by Netrebko with the Vienna Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon. Most of his symphonic recordings have been made for the Chandos label and include a complete cycle of the Liszt symphonic poems (finished in 2007) and a cycle of Beethoven's nine symphonies with the BBC Symphony. In 2020, Noseda issued several albums, including Dvorák's New World Symphony and Copland's Billy the Kid with the National Symphony, Shostakovich's Symphonies Nos. 5 and 1 with the London Symphony, and Luigi Dallapiccola's Il Prigioniero with the Danish National Symphony. Recordings in his Shostakovich cycle with the London Symphony continued to appear through the COVID-19 pandemic; an album combining the Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 54, and Symphony No. 15 in A minor, Op. 141, appeared on the LSO Live label in 2023. By that time, his recording catalog comprised more than 80 items. ~ Robert Cummings & James Manheim

Already a presence to be reckoned with by his early twenties, James Ehnes claims a place among the finest violinists of the day. Ehnes has a large and growing recording catalog, counting two Grammy Awards among his accolades. In 2024, he was heard on a recording of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto with Sir Andrew Davis, as well as one of John Williams' Violin Concerto with Stéphane Denève.

Ehnes was born on January 27, 1976, into a musical family in Brandon, Manitoba. He was exposed to a variety of instruments as a child but found himself attracted to the violin. At age four, he began lessons with his father, a trumpet professor at Brandon University, and by nine, Ehnes came into the care of François Chaplin, a respected violin pedagogue on the faculty of Brandon University. Under Chaplin's tutelage, Ehnes won the 1987 grand prize in strings during the Canadian Music Competition; in 1988, he won first prize in strings at the Canadian Music Festival, becoming the youngest musician to have accomplished that feat. At the Meadowmount School summer program in upstate New York, Ehnes began studying with Sally Thomas, whose presence at the Juilliard School of Music in New York induced him to enroll there to continue his work with her. At Juilliard, Ehnes appreciated Thomas' nontraditional instructional methodology; with her, he was able to explore his own solutions to technical and interpretive problems.

Ehnes signed a contract with Telarc Records in 1995. He made his recording debut that year on a disc featuring the Paganini Caprices. Arts manager Walter Homburger came out of retirement to guide Ehnes' career several years before his graduation from Juilliard with the Peter Mennin Prize for Outstanding Achievement and Leadership in Music in 1997. Ehnes works with many of the world's leading conductors and orchestras, and his success as a recitalist led him to chamber music collaborations with such artists as pianists Leif Ove Andsnes and Louis Lortie and cellists Yo-Yo Ma and Steven Doane. Among his other acclaimed recordings are a collection of Debussy, Ravel, and Saint-Saëns works (2000) with accompanist Wendy Chen and the Bruch Violin Concertos No. 1 and No. 3 (2011) with Charles Dutoit and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

In 2010, he founded the Ehnes Quartet, was inducted into the Order of Canada, and has also served as the director of the Seattle Chamber Music Society. Ehnes has been one of the most visible violinists of the 2010s decade, appearing and recording often in Europe as well as North America. In each year of that decade, with one exception, he released multiple albums, and the year 2017 alone saw five of them. In all, Ehnes has won 11 Juno Awards and two Grammys (for Barber, Korngold, Walton: Violin Concertos, and James Newton Howard, Aaron Jay Kernis: Violin Concertos).

In 2019, Ehnes released three albums, including a new recording of Beethoven's first three violin sonatas with pianist Andrew Armstrong, on Onyx. When concert halls were shuttered in the early 2020s, Ehnes produced a streaming series of "Recitals from Home" before returning to the recording studio and resuming his prolific pace. In 2024, he was backed on a recording of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto by Sir Andrew Davis leading the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and he also issued a recording of John Williams' Violin Concerto with Stéphane Denève leading the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. ~ TiVo Staff