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Veteran conductor Mario Venzago has been active in his native Switzerland, across Europe, and in the U.S., where he was partly trained. From 2010 to 2021, he was the conductor of Switzerland's Bern Symphony Orchestra, and he remains active as a guest conductor.

Venzago was born in Zurich on July 1, 1948. His family was of Italian and German background, and his brother Alberto Venzago was a noted photographer. Mario took up the piano at the age of four or five. He attended the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Zurich, studying conducting with Erich Schmid. At first, his main focus was the piano, and after a period of touring, he found a permanent job with Switzerland's Italian-language Radiotelevisione Svizzera as a pianist and accompanist; he made his first recordings during this period under the radio network's auspices. He also served as music director of Switzerland's Stadttheater Winterthur from 1978 to 1986. Venzago traveled to Vienna for further conducting studies with Hans Swarowsky and then rounded out his education as a conducting fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, studying with Leonard Bernstein. While there, he made his U.S. debut, conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. Venzago also worked as general music director of the city of Heidelberg, Germany, and as chief conductor of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen during this period. In 1992, he conducted a recording of Othmar Schoeck's opera Venus for the Musikszene Schweiz label.

From 1991 to 1994, Venzago served as music director of the Graz Opera. He moved on to the Sinfonieorchester Basel from 1997 to 2003, also serving as music director of the Basque National Orchestra from 1998 to 2001. Venzago remained active in the U.S., succeeding Pinchas Zukerman as artistic director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's summer music festival from 2000 to 2003 and serving as music director of the Indianapolis Symphony from 2002 to 2009. He was principal conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in Sweden from 2004 to 2007. In 2010, Venzago moved to the Bern Symphony Orchestra, remaining there until 2021 and continuing as an honorary conductor. He also served as Artist in Association with the Tapiola Symphony in Finland from 2013 to 2019. Venzago remains active in the 2020s, making frequent guest conducting appearances. He has recorded for various labels, including Novalis, BIS, and CPO; for the latter, he led the Bern Symphony in a series of Bruckner symphony recordings that incorporated historical performance techniques. By 2023, when Venzago conducted the Singapore Symphony in a program of film scores on the Chandos label, his recording catalog comprised more than 35 items. ~ James Manheim

Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden's second-largest city, is home to the oldest and most prestigious professional orchestra in the country. The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra's extensive schedule includes roughly 100 concerts in their home concert hall, international tours, recordings, and outreach programs for school children. The orchestra was named "Sweden's National Orchestra" in 1997 by the Swedish government.

The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1905 as an orchestral association, the Göteborgs Orkesterförening, with funding from local industries. The first concerts were given the same year under the baton of Heinrich Hammer. Composer Wilhelm Stenhammar was principal conductor from 1907 until 1922. Stenhammar was a firm leader and an innovator as a symphony director, with a gift for orchestra building and a wide-ranging interest in new repertory. Reasoning that children benefited from exposure to orchestral music, he was among the first conductors anywhere to establish regular school outreach concerts. This has resulted in symphony concerts becoming one of the favorite forms of musical entertainment in Gothenburg and the surrounding area. Stenhammar and the Gothenburg Symphony were the first to introduce the music of Danish composer Carl Nielsen to Sweden.

Stenhammar's successors as music director have included Tor Mann, Ture Rängstrom, Dean Dixon, Charles Dutoit, and Sixten Ehrling. Neeme Järvi served as principal conductor from 1982-2004, during which time the orchestra began a long association with the BIS record company, making both Järvi and the orchestra world-famous. Following Järvi as principal conductor were Mario Venzago from 2004-2007 and Gustavo Dudamel from 2007-2012. In 2017, Santtu-Matias Rouvali was named principal conductor, with a contract running through 2025. Since 1987, the orchestra has toured throughout Sweden, Europe, Asia, and the U.S., regularly performing in festivals in Sweden and abroad.

An early obstacle for the orchestra, the lack of a suitable concert hall, was remedied in 1935 with the opening of the Göteborgs Konserthus, a municipally financed hall. This hall is compared favorably with such venues as Boston's Orchestra Hall, Carnegie Hall, and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw as one of the best-sounding concert halls in the world. The richness and clarity of the sound is one of the factors that have set the high standards the Gothenburg Symphony has met.

The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra has produced dozens of recordings, mainly on the BIS and Deutsche Grammophon labels, including complete cycles of music with orchestra by Sibelius, Tubin, Nielsen, Grieg, Borodin, among others, as well as the complete operas by Rachmaninov. In 2019, under Rouvali, the orchestra released the album Sibelius: Symphony No. 1; En Saga on the Alpha label. ~ Joseph Stevenson & Keith Finke

Geraldine McGreevy began a fast-developing career as a soprano when she won the prestigious Kathleen Ferrier Award in 1996.

She is a music graduate of the University of Birmingham. She taught in Martel, France for two years, then returned to England to continue postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She earned the Royal Academy of Music Diploma (DipRAM), which is given only to students of high honors, and also won the Academy's Shinn Fellowship in 1996.

In the 1997-1998 season, she studied at the National Opera Studio, a workshop for promising young singers sponsored by the English National Opera, and after that continued her voice studies with Richard Smart.

She sang with the British Youth Opera as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, First Lady in Mozart's Magic Flute, Mistress Page in Vaughan Williams' Sir John in Love, and the Casilda in Sullivan's The Gondoliers. At the Royal Academy in 1997, she sang the part of Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte, and has repeated the role with Opera Zuid. At the Welsh National Opera she has sung the role of the ghost Miss Jessel in Britten's The Turn of the Screw and the Female Chorus in the same composer's The Rape of Lucretia at the Edinburgh Festival. Other roles are Angelica in Orlando, Poppea in Agrippina, Galatea in Acis and Galatea, Micaëla in Carmen and Laurette in Le Docteur Miracle.

Her debut recital at London's Wigmore Hall was in 1997. She has returned there several times, and also has sung recitals at St. John's, Smith, Square, the Frankfurt Opera House, the Edinburgh Festival, and the Klavier Festival Ruhr. She has performed with such leading accompanists as Julius Drake and Graham Johnson.

McGreevy has developed a body of credits in concert performances. She sang in Zurich, Switzerland with the Moscow Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jane Glover, at the Cologne Philharmonie with the Sharoun Ensemble conducted by Anne Manson, The English Concert with Trevor Pinnock, the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields with Sir Neville Marriner, The London Philharmonic Orchestra with Kurt Masur and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Libor Pesek conducting.

She has recorded for Hyperion, taking part in that label's acclaimed series of Schubert Lieder with Graham Johnson. Other recordings for Hyperion include a set of songs by Arthur Bliss with the Nash Ensemble and music of John Blow with Red Byrd and the Parley of Instruments. She has appeared regularly on BBC broadcasts.

The repertory of versatile violinist Isabelle van Keulen includes many contemporary works as well as standard repertory. She often performs chamber music and sometimes plays the viola as well as the violin.

Van Keulen was born on December 16, 1966, in the small town of Mijdrecht in the Netherlands. Her father was an artist, and her sister plays the flute. Van Keulen took up the violin at age six and soon began lessons with Theo de Bakker. She gave her first concert at 10. Van Keulen enrolled at Alkwin College in Uithoorn, and in 1984, she entered the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam, where her principal teacher was Davina van Wely. She also had instruction from Vladimir Spivakov, Boris Gutnikov, and Sándor Végh. Two major prizes helped van Keulen's career along: she won the Menuhin Competition in Folkestone, England, in 1983 and the 1984 Eurovision Young Musician of the Year Competition in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1988, she made her recording debut on the Deutsche Grammophon label as part of an octet led by violinist Gidon Kremer, performing Schubert's Octet in F major, D. 803.

That was the first of many chamber recordings made by van Keulen, who often collaborated during the first part of her career with pianist Ronald Brautigam. She founded the Isos Quartet in 1995 and performed with that group as its first violinist. From 1996 to 2006, van Keulen served as artistic director of the Delft International Music Festival. She also performs as a soloist. Both her concert repertory and her recording catalog feature contemporary music prominently, and she has premiered various important works, including Erkki-Sven Tüür's violin-and-clarinet concerto Noesis (2006). Van Keulen has recorded for Koch International, BIS, and Challenge Classics, among other labels; on the latter, she joined pianist Oliver Triendl for the album Grigory Frid: The Complete Works for Violin and Piano. ~ James Manheim