Baiba Skride

Born in 1981, the Latvian violinist Baiba Skride began her studies in her native city of Riga. In 1995 she transferred to the Rostock Music Academy to continue her education with Petru Munteanu. As the winner of the Concours Reine Elisabeth in Brussels in 2001, she launched her international career, which since then has taken her to numerous world-class orchestras. Baiba Skride has performed with such ensembles as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Boston and the Chicago Symphony Orchestras, the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In the 2017-18 season, she played Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic under Dima Slobo-
deniouk and Berg’s Violin Concerto with the Gewandhaus Orchestra under Andris Nelsons. She made her debut with the Mariinsky Orchestra playing the Beethoven Concerto, a work she also performed with the Schles-wig-Holstein Festival Orchestra. Baiba Skride has increasingly devoted herself to contemporary music. In 2017 she premiered Sofia Gubaidulina’s Triple Concerto for violin, cello, and bayan with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and she subsequently introduced that piece in the Netherlands, Germany, and France. Chamber music occupies an important part of her artistic work, in collaborations with the cellists Sol Gabetta, Harriet Krijgh, Alban Gerhardt, and Daniel Müller-Schott; the harpist Xavier de Maistre; and the pianists Bertrand Chamayou and Lauma Skride, her younger sister. She has released various CDs, including of violin concertos by Sibelius, Nielsen, Brahms, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Tchaikovsky. Baiba Skride plays the “Yfrah Neaman” Stradivari, which is generously provided by the family of the deceased Lebanese violinist.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut on 4 September 2012, when she performed Gubaidulina’s Violin Concerto Offertorium with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelsons.

July 2018