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Soprano Juliane Banse has a varied repertory of opera and concert music and is especially famed for her performances in Mahler's symphonies. She is also a noted educator.

Banse was born in Tettnang, West Germany, on July 10, 1969. She moved with her family to Zurich, Switzerland, as a toddler. Musically talented, she took up the violin at age five and also took ballet lessons, making her stage debut as a dancer at the Zurich Opera House. One critic noted later that even as a singer, she retained the manner of a ballet dancer. Banse switched to voice at 15, taking lessons with Paul Steiner and then with Ruth Rohner at the Zurich Opera House. She moved on to the Musikhochschule in Munich, studing with Brigitte Fassbaender and Daphne Evangelatos. Banse took first prize at the Kulturforum competition in Munich in 1989, and she has continued to win major prizes throughout her career.

The Munich prize led to a series of engagements in Mozart roles for Banse at the Komische Oper Berlin. Banse made her recording debut in 1993 on the Jecklin label on a volume in a series of the complete songs of Othmar Schoeck. The Mozart appearances in Berlin brought opera parts around Europe and a regular cast member slot at the Wiener Staatsoper beginning in 1994. That year, she made her debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in a concert presentation of Berg's Lulu Suite. Banse made her U.S. debut the following year, with the St. Louis Symphony in Mahler's Symphony No. 2 in C minor. She has gone on to give Mahler symphony performances under such conductors as Simon Rattle, Pierre Boulez, and Lorin Maazel, among others. Banse has appeared at many major opera houses and has a flourishing career as a lieder singer, having been accompanied by such major pianists as András Schiff, Maurizio Pollini, and Helmut Deutsch. The latter was accompanist on her contributions to a complete cycle of Brahms songs on the CPO label. As of 2022, Banse had appeared on more than 100 recordings, including, early that year, a reading of Hans Werner Henze's Nachtstücke und Arien on the Naxos label. Her recorded output is notable for its breadth, including music from Bach to the contemporary era. Banse has been on the faculty of the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf since early 2017. ~ James Manheim

Conductor Sebastian Weigle specializes in Romantic opera, especially Wagner, and has conducted at some of the world's leading opera houses. He also conducts symphonic music and, as of the mid-2020s, was serving as chief conductor of the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo.

Weigle was born in 1961 in East Berlin, East Germany. His father, Gottfried Weigle, was the cantor at the Schlosskirche in the city's Berlin-Buch district, and he is the nephew of the conductor Jörg-Peter Weigle. His first instrument was the French horn, and he was a founding member of the Berlin Wind Quintet in 1975. Weigle attended Berlin's Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler, studying horn, piano, and conducting. He later held a lectureship there. In 1982, he became principal hornist of the Berlin Staatskapelle, remaining in that position until 1997. Weigle also played the horn in the East Berlin jazz orchestra Vielharmonie and was a member of the Berliner Oktett. The Staatskapelle position was a prestigious one, but Weigle remained interested in conducting. He founded the Kammerchor Berlin in 1987, handpicking its members, and in 1990, he became conductor of the Neues Berliner Kammerorchester. From 1993 to 2018, he was music director of the Junge Philharmonie Brandenburg. The year 1993 also saw Weigle make his recording debut as hornist of the Berliner Bläserquintett on the album Jean Françaix in Concert. His conducting debut on recordings came in 1998 on the MDG label, leading the Ensemble Villa Musica on an album of works by Louis Spohr.

Weigle's career as an opera conductor specializing in German opera grew rapidly in the late '90s and the first years of the new century. He became First Staatskapellmeister at the Staatsoper Berlin in 1997, and from 2004 to 2009, he was general music director of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, Spain. Weigle made his debut at the Bayreuth Festival in 2007, leading a new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg that was directed by Richard Wagner's great-granddaughter Katharina Wagner. The following year, he became general music director of the Frankfurt Opera.

Weigle has been in high demand with prestigious companies as a guest conductor, including the Staatsoper Hamburg (in Strauss' Salome) in 2014), the Metropolitan Opera in New York (in Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier) in 2017, and Covent Garden in London (in Engelbert Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel) in 2019. That year, he was named principal conductor of the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony in Tokyo, where he remained as of the mid-2020s; he stepped down as director of the Frankfurt Opera in 2023. Weigle has a substantial recording catalog of well over 40 albums, many of them made with the Frankfurt Opera forces, devoted to German opera and appearing on the Oehms Classics label. In 2023, he moved to Naxos, leading the Frankfurter Opern- and Museumsorchester, Frankfurt Opera Chorus, and soloists in Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Christmas Eve. ~ James Manheim

The Munich Radio Orchestra (German: Münchener Rundfunkorchester) is associated with Germany's Bavarian Radio public broadcaster, but should not be confused with the network's other orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks), which is devoted to mainstream symphonic repertory. The Munich Radio Orchestra has specialized in light music, adding forays into Italian opera, contemporary sacred music, and even -- in its frequent concerts in Munich -- jazz and video game music, the latter perhaps designed for the orchestra's extensive youth activities.

Orchestral music associated with Munich radio dates back to the 1920s, but the current Munich Radio Orchestra was founded in 1952. Its first music director was Werner Schmidt-Boelke, who built it into an ensemble devoted to the accompaniment of operetta productions over his 15-year tenure. The focus on operetta and opera has continued into the 21st century: the year 2015 saw the orchestra performing on a new recording of Lehár's Giuditta. But the group's repertory has broadened to include rarely heard symphonic works of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Munich Radio Orchestra has recorded for Bavarian Radio's own label, BR Klassik, and for a variety of other high-prestige German and Austrian labels including Oehms, CPO, and the opera revival specialist label Preiser. The orchestra's current chief conductor, its ninth, is Croatia's Ivan Repusic, who took up the baton in 2017 after the retirement of Ulf Schirmer. ~ James Manheim