Carnegie Hall

Christoph Eschenbach—music director of both the National Symphony Orchestra and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—is in great demand by the finest orchestras and opera houses across the world. Now in his sixth season, he has led the National Symphony Orchestra on multiple international tours. In addition, Mr. Eschenbach appears as pianist on the Fortas Chamber Music Concerts and other series at the Kennedy Center. His season highlights also include engagements with the Royal Stockholm and Vienna philharmonic orchestras.

A prolific recording artist, Mr. Eschenbach has an impressive discography. As a conductor, he has recorded with The Philadelphia Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, NDR Sinfonieorchester, and Houston Symphony. His recordings have received prestigious honors, including the 2014 Grammy for Best Classical Compendium, BBC Music Magazine’s Disc of the Month, Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice, and the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik. His Ondine recording of the music of Kaija Saariaho with the Orchestre de Paris and soprano Karita Mattila won the 2009 MIDEM Classical Award in Contemporary Music. Of particular note is his recording and filming of the full cycle of Mahler symphonies with the Orchestre de Paris, available on his website for free streaming.

Mentored by George Szell and Herbert von Karajan, Mr. Eschenbach has enjoyed a career that has included music directorships of the Orchestre de Paris (2000–2010), The Philadelphia Orchestra (2003–2008), Ravinia Festival (1994–2003), NDR Sinfonieorchester (1998–2004), and Houston Symphony (1988–1999). He has also served as artistic director of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival (1999–2002) and as chief conductor and artistic director of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich (1982–1986).

Mr. Eschenbach’s many honors include the 2015 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and the Officer’s Cross and Commander’s Cross of the German Order of Merit. He also received the Leonard Bernstein Award from the Pacific Music Festival, where he was co-artistic director (1992–1998).

Mr. Eschenbach frequently mentors gifted young performers and works regularly with the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra. In Washington, he offers rehearsal opportunities to the students of the National Symphony Orchestra’s Youth Fellowship Program.

Valery Gergiev leads the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America for the second time, having conducted the inaugural tour in 2013. Mr. Gergiev is known for his cycles of works by Berlioz, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and many others, which he has performed with the Mariinsky Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, and Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.

Now in his first full season as music director of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Mr. Gergiev has already presented a cycle of the five Prokofiev piano concertos in one day, led such masterworks as Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, and recently returned from a tour of Asia with the orchestra. In previous years as music director designate, he implemented the performance of all 15 Shostakovich symphonies, as well as cycles of works by Stravinsky.

Having completed a nine-year tenure as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, which included many recordings and international tours, Mr. Gergiev now concentrates on leading the legendary Mariinsky Theatre, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Stars of White Nights, Moscow Easter, and Rotterdam Philharmonic Gergiev festivals. In 1998, he followed Sir Georg Solti as principal conductor of the World Orchestra of Peace, a position in which he continues today.

Valery Gergiev was born in Moscow and studied conducting with Ilya Musin at the Leningrad Conservatory. As a student, he won the Herbert von Karajan Conducting Competition in Berlin. In 1978, at the age of 24, he became assistant conductor to Yuri Temirkanov at the Mariinsky Theatre, where he made his debut with Prokofiev’s War and Peace. In 2003, he became the first Russian conductor since Tchaikovsky to conduct Carnegie Hall’s Opening Night Gala. His recordings on LSO Live and the Mariinsky label have been acclaimed worldwide. Today he is a popular guest on all the great stages of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including at the Salzburg Festival and the Metropolitan Opera.

Born in Poland, Emanuel Ax captured public attention in 1974 when he won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv. In 1975, he won the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists, followed four years later by the coveted Avery Fisher Prize.

Three prominent duo collaborations will be carried through Mr. Ax’s current season. Beginning with the release of sonatas by Fauré and R. Strauss on the Deutsche Grammophon label, Mr. Ax will partner with longtime friend and colleague Itzhak Perlman for concerts in Kansas City, Dallas, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and La Jolla, as well as at Ravinia. A return visit to Japan will be followed by concerts in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Tel Aviv, and Amsterdam. As an annual guest with the New York Philharmonic, he will perform Brahms with Alan Gilbert in addition to return visits to orchestras in Houston, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, as well as duo recitals in Philadelphia and New York with violinist Pamela Frank. Longstanding partner Yo-Yo Ma will join him in Norfolk, Washington, and New York, where they will program all the complete Beethoven sonatas for cello and piano. Solo recitals in Tokyo, Arizona, Florida, Texas, and Boston culminate at Carnegie Hall in May as part of the Hall’s 125th anniversary.

The latter half of Mr. Ax’s 2014–2015 season featured two projects, the first being his curated two-week Celebrate the Piano festival with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, in which multiple pianists gave a variety of performances to explore the many facets of the instrument. The second was a European tour with The Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin that began at Carnegie Hall. He also returned to the orchestras of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Cincinnati, Dallas, Washington, Nashville, Atlanta, St. Louis, Montreal, and Ottawa. In Europe, he performed with the Berliner Philharmoniker, followed by a tour to Vienna, Salzburg, Graz, and London in performances of Schubert’s Winterreise with Simon Keenlyside, as well as appearances in Amsterdam and Paris with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Bernard Haitink. Other European orchestras with which he performed include the London Symphony Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, and the national orchestras of Toulouse and Lyon.

A Sony Classical exclusive recording artist since 1987, recent releases include Mendelssohn trios with Yo-Yo- Ma and Itzhak Perlman, Strauss’s Enoch Arden narrated by Patrick Stewart, and discs of two-piano music by Brahms and Rachmaninoff with Yefim Bronfman. Mr. Ax has received Grammy Awards for the second and third volumes of his cycle of Haydn’s piano sonatas. He has also made a series of Grammy-winning recordings of the Beethoven and Brahms sonatas for cello and piano with Yo-Yo Ma. His other recordings include the concertos of Liszt and Schoenberg, three solo Brahms albums, an album of tangos by Astor Piazzolla, and the premiere recording of John Adams’s Century Rolls with The Cleveland Orchestra for Nonesuch. In the 2004–2005 season, Mr. Ax contributed to an International Emmy Award–winning BBC documentary to commemorate the Holocaust, which aired on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In 2013, his recording Variations received an ECHO Klassik award.

In recent years, Mr. Ax has turned his attention toward the music of 20th-century composers, premiering works by John Adams, Christopher Rouse, Krzysztof Penderecki, Bright Sheng, and Melinda Wagner. Mr. Ax is also devoted to chamber music, and has worked regularly with such artists as Young Uck Kim, Cho-Liang Lin, Edgar Meyer, Peter Serkin, Jaime Laredo, and the late Isaac Stern.

Mr. Ax resides in New York City with his wife, pianist Yoko Nozaki. They have two children together, Joseph and Sarah. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds honorary doctorates of music from Yale and Columbia universities. For more information, visit emanuelax.com.

Since his triumph in 1998 at the 11th International Tchaikovsky Competition, Denis Matsuev has become a virtuoso in the grandest Russian tradition of pianism and has quickly established himself as one of the most prominent pianists of his generation.

Mr. Matsuev appears with the world’s best-known orchestras, such as the Chicago, Pittsburgh, and London symphony orchestras; the New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles philharmonic orchestras; the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; Berliner Philharmoniker; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; the BBC Symphony Orchestra; and the Mariinsky Orchestra. Mr. Matsuev also collaborates with the world’s most prominent conductors, including Valery Gergiev, Zubin Mehta, Mariss Jansons, Yuri Temirkanov, Paavo Järvi, Leonard Slatkin, Myung-whun Chung, Antonio Pappano, Semyon Bychkov, Iván Fischer, Ádám Fischer, Gianandrea Noseda, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, James Conlon, Vladimir Spivakov, Mikhail Pletnev, Vladimir Fedoseyev, Yuri Bashmet, and Yuri Simonov, among others.

Mr. Matsuev is a frequent guest at such music festivals as the Verbier, Lucerne, and Montreux festivals in Switzerland; BBC Proms and Edinburgh International festivals in Great Britain; Schleswig-Holstein, Rheingau, and 29 Baden-Baden festivals in Germany; Chorégies d’Orange and Festival de la Rogue d’Anthéron in France; Ravinia and the Hollywood Bowl in the US; Chopin Festival in Poland; Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and MITO Festival in Italy; Enescu Festival in Romania; Baltic Sea Festival in Sweden; and Stars of the White Nights in Russia. Mr. Matsuev has also been a soloist with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra since 1995.

Mr. Matsuev has led numerous musical festivals and educational projects. Since 2004, he has organized Stars on Baikal in Irkutsk, Siberia, and in 2009 he was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of Irkutsk. Since 2005, he has been the artistic director of Crescendo, a series of events held in international cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Tel Aviv, Kaliningrad, Paris, and New York. In 2010, he became the artistic director of the Annecy Classical Festival in France; in 2012, he became the artistic director of the first International Astana Piano Passion Festival and Competition; and in 2013, he became the artistic director of the International Festival and Competition Sberbank Debut in Kiev. In addition, Mr. Matsuev is the president of the charitable Russian foundation New Names, which discovers and supports talented children and helps develop music education throughout regions of his native Russia.

At the invitation of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s grandson Alexander Rachmaninoff, Mr. Matsuev has collaborated with the Sergei Rachmaninoff Foundation, performing and recording unknown pieces by Rachmaninoff on the composer’s own piano at his house in Lucerne, known as Villa Senar. Mr. Matsuev has since become the artistic director of the foundation.

Mr. Matsuev is the recipient of awards that include the Presidential Council for Culture and Art’s Honored Artist of Russia, the prestigious Shostakovich Prize in Music, and the State Prize of the Russian Federation in Literature and Arts. He is a People’s Artist of Russia and an honorary professor at Moscow State University, and was recently appointed head of the Public Council under the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. In February 2014, he performed at the closing ceremony of the XXII Winter Olympics in Sochi. In April 2014, Mr. Matsuev was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador.