Lisa Batiashvili and Daniel Harding

Harding attracted attention early in his career as assistant to Sir Simon Rattle with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. This was followed by an assistantship with Claudio Abbado and the Berliner Philharmoniker, where Harding conducted for the first time in 1996. In the same year, he made his debut at the BBC Proms in London - as the youngest conductor in the history of the festival. By the time he was 30, Harding had conducted every major orchestra in the world. In 2011, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra appointed him Honorary Conductor for Life. He was Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris from 2016 to 2019 and Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra from 2007 to 2017. But Daniel Harding has another passion: he has also been working as a pilot since 2018. For him, making music and flying complement each other: "I wanted to find something that would challenge other areas of my brain."

She regularly works with orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and has also been a regular guest with the Berliner Philharmoniker since 2004. The partnership will be further intensified in the 2023/24 season when Lisa Batiashvili appears as the orchestra's Artist-in-Residence, both as a soloist and as a chamber musician. The German-born Georgian musician, who received an honorary doctorate from the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts in Helsinki in 2018, set up her own foundation in 2021, in which she is committed to supporting young, highly talented Georgian musicians. Lisa Batiashvili plays a violin from 1739 by Joseph Guarneri "del Gesu". Her recordings - Secret Love Letters and City Lights are her most recent albums - have won numerous prizes, including the Echo Klassik and the Midem Classical Award.