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Renaud Capuçon is among France's top violinists, with a repertory that includes contemporary music as well as French and German standards. He is a major star of the Erato label's roster.

Capuçon was born in Chambéry in the French Alps on January 27, 1976. He began studies at the local conservatory at age four. His brother is cellist Gautier Capuçon, and the two have performed and recorded together, notably in the Brahms Double Concerto in A minor, Op. 102. At 14, Renaud entered the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP), studying there with Gérard Poulet and Veda Reynolds, winning top prizes in chamber music and violin upon graduation. He went on to study with Isaac Stern and has played Stern's Guarneri del Gesù violin in performance. In 1996, he founded the Rencontres artistiques de Bel-Air festival in La Ravoire, near Chambéry, and headed it until 2010; in 2013, he established a new Easter festival in Aix-en-Provence. In 1997, Capuçon was named concertmaster of the European Youth Orchestra under conductor Claudio Abbado. He remained in the position for three years, by which time he had already launched his recording career on the Virgin Classics label with a 1999 recording of Schubert works for violin and piano.

In the early 2000s, Capuçon gained considerable celebrity as both a performer and recording artist. He often performs French music by the likes of Franck, Ravel, and Dutilleux, but he is also at home in German music from Beethoven to Brahms. Capuçon also performs works by Kodály, Halvorsen, Erwin Schulhoff, and more, as well as contemporary works such as the 2002 Sonata for violin and cello by Éric Tanguy and a 2015 violin concerto he commissioned from Wolfgang Rihm. Capuçon has performed with numerous major orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony, and he is an enthusiastic chamber music player who has collaborated with pianists Nicholas Angelich, Martha Argerich, and Hélène Grimaud, among others. He has recorded some 70 albums, mostly for the related Virgin Classics and Erato labels, including a complete cycle of Beethoven's violin sonatas with pianist Frank Braley. In 2021, Capuçon issued three new albums, one of Elgar's Violin Concerto in B minor, Op. 61, with Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra, one of chamber works by contemporary composer Michael Jarrell, and one of Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa, on which he conducted the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne. He returned with a pair of albums in 2022 and three more in 2023, the latter including a cycle of Mozart's violin concertos on the Deutsche Grammophon label, on which he again conducted the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne. The year 2024 saw Capuçon issue the Erato album Les Choses de la Vie: Cinema II, his second album of film themes. ~ James Manheim

Though the long career of Richard Strauss spanned one of the most chaotic periods in political, social, and cultural history of the world, the composer retained his essentially Romantic aesthetic even into the age of television, jet engines, and atom bombs.

Born in Munich in 1864, Strauss was the son of Franz Joseph Strauss, the principal hornist in the Munich Court Orchestra. Strauss demonstrated musical aptitude at an early age, and extensive training in piano, violin, theory, harmony, and orchestration equipped him to produce music of extraordinary polish and maturity by the time he reached adulthood. His primary teachers had been his father, who was a musical conservative, and Ludwig Thuille, a Munich School composer and family friend. Strauss' Serenade for 13 Winds, Op. 7 (1881), written when he was 17, led conductor Hans von Bülow to pronounce him "by far the most striking personality since Brahms." Bülow was able to give Strauss his first commission and an assistant conductor position. Through new friendships, Strauss learned to admire the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the music of Wagner and Liszt. He embarked on a long career of conducting and composing, which took him all over Europe and the U.S.

From the beginning of Strauss' career as a composer, it was evident that the orchestra was his natural medium. With the composition of the "symphonic fantasy" Aus Italien in 1886, Strauss embarked on a series of works that represents both one of the pivotal phases of his career and a body of music of central importance in the late German Romantic repertoire. Though he did not invent the tone poem per se, he brought it to its pinnacle. In such works as Don Juan (1888-1889), Ein Heldenleben (1897-1898), and Also sprach Zarathustra (1895-1896) -- of which first minute or so, thanks to its use in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, is the composer's most readily recognizable music -- Strauss displayed his abundant gift for exploiting the coloristic possibilities of the orchestra as a dramatic device like few composers ever had (or have since).

With the arrival of the 20th century, after becoming conductor at Berlin's Hofoper, Strauss' interest turned more fully to opera, resulting in a body of unforgettable works that have long been fixtures of the repertoire: Salome (1903-1905), Elektra (1906-1908), and Der Rosenkavalier (1909-1910) are just a few of his best-known efforts for the stage. In 1919, Strauss became co-director of the Vienna Staatsoper, but was forced to resign five years later by his partner, Franz Schalk, who resented being left with many of the operational duties while Strauss was frequently away guest conducting or being feted as a great composer. When the political situation in Europe became malignant in the 1930s, profound political naïveté led to Strauss' confused involvement the Nazi propaganda machine, and the composer eventually alienated both the Nazis and their opponents. With the end of World War II, however, he was permitted to resume his professional life, although it would be a mere echo of his previous fame. He began to have serious health problems, his financial situation had been compromised, and the monuments that embodied great German art for him -- Goethe's Weimar house; the Dresden, Munich, and Vienna opera houses -- had been destroyed. Throughout his last years, works such as the Oboe Concerto (1945) and the expressive Four Last Songs (1948) attest to Strauss' unwavering confidence in his singular musical voice.