Daniel Barenboim

Daniel Barenboim, one of the greatest artists of our time, has achieved the highest distinction as a performer on the world's leading stages. He has also addressed a wider audience as a champion of the cause of opening minds through culture and an advocate for the mutually dependent arts of deep listening and free dialogue. Born in Buenos Aires in 1942 to Russian-Jewish immigrants, both his parents were musicians and gifted teachers. He studied piano with his father, who remained his only teacher. His love for music deepened when he gave his first public recital at the age of seven and was nourished after the family came to Europe in 1952, en route to a new life in Israel. In Salzburg, he began studying conducting with Igor Markevitch, and also met Wilhelm Furtwängler, who declared the eleven-year-old to be "a phenomenon". Already present in the first recordings he made as a pianist in 1955, while he was studying harmony and counterpoint in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, these skills became more acute over time. His enormous discography as both a pianist and conductor spans everything from the complete piano sonatas, concertos, and symphonies of Beethoven to works by Boulez and Carter. Barenboim's artistic development was strongly influenced by the experience of making music with, among others, his late wife, the cellist Jacqueline Du Pré, the violinists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman, and the singers Dame Janet Baker and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. He absorbed lifelong practical lessons from Sir John Barbirolli with the Hallé Orchestra. In the 1960s, Barenboim refined his conducting skills, while simultaneously forging an international reputation as solo pianist and chamber musician. But 1968 saw his conducting career gained momentum with performances in New York with the London Symphony Orchestra. He soon forged close relationships as a guest conductor with the Berliner Philharmoniker, London Philharmonic, and Chicago Symphony orchestras, as well as revealing his affinity for opera with a series of Mozart performances at the Edinburgh International Festival, beginning in 1973 with Don Giovanni. In 1991, Barenboim met Palestinian-American literary critic and public intellectual Edward Said. Sharing the same views on the future of the Middle East, they became close friends and, in 1999, founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, whose home is at the Pierre Boulez Saal. Barenboim is also an Honorary Conductor for Life for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Music Director at Berlin's Staatsoper and Chief Conductor for Life of its orchestra, the Berlin Staatskapelle, as well as the first Honorary Conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker, after having been Music Director at la Scala in Milan from 2011 to the end of 2014.