Lauma Skride

Piano

Lauma Skride's playing is 'wonderfully sensitive, with marvellous tone quality, and always with highly virtuosic vigour', according to a review by the Bavarian Broadcasting Service. Combined with brilliant technique, these are the qualities with which Lauma Skride captivates audiences on major concert stages throughout the world, both as a soloist and chamber musician.

In recent seasons, Lauma Skride has appeared with Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Dresden Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Hamburg Symphony Orchestra and the Orquesta de Gran Canaria.   This season she appears with Berliner Kammerorchester and Markus Poschner and, with her long-established chamber music partner Baiba Skride, she will give world premiere performances of a new double concerto by Hans Abrahamsen, with the Royal Danish and Swedish Chamber Orchestras.

Lauma Skride, who was awarded the Beethoven Ring in 2008, is highly acclaimed for her interpretations of Germanic classical and romantic repertoire. Her broad repertoire includes works by Haydn and Schumann as well as rarities by such composers as Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn. Lauma Skride performs with such conductors as Andris Nelsons, Kristjan Järvi, Anu Tali, Muhai Tang, Peter Ruzicka, John Storgårds, Pedro Halffter, André de Ridder, Yan Pascal Tortelier and Cornelius Meister.

Lauma Skride continues to appear regularly as a duo with her sister, Baiba. The sisters recently performed the Haydn and Mendelssohn Double Concertos for violin and piano with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Zürich Chamber Orchestra. Last season, with Jan Vogler, they played Beethoven's Triple Concerto with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, also presenting trio and duo recitals in Cincinnati and San Francisco.  Passionate energy, youthful vigour and musical sensitivity have become the trademarks of the Skride duo, as they demonstrated to listeners at Hamburg's Laeiszhalle in June 2010. The duo will this season return to London’s Wigmore Hall for an evening recital, to include works by Prokofiev and Mozart.

Lauma Skride's chamber music partners also include cellists Daniel Müller-Schott, Jing Zhao, with whom she appeared in Tokyo and Osaka in December 2010, Sol Gabetta and Julian Steckel, with whom she appears this season in Saarbrücken, Stuttgart, Essen and Zürich.

Lauma Skride recorded Fanny Hensel's piano cycle Das Jahr for Sony in 2007 and received an ECHO Classic Award as Best Young Artist for this recording.

Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1982, Lauma Skride is the youngest of three daughters in a musical family. She began playing the piano at the age of five and was later a pupil of Anita Paze at the Emil Darzin School of Music in Riga. She then studied under Volker Banfield at the University of Music and Theatre in Hamburg. Lauma Skride has participated in numerous international competitions since the age of eleven, among them the Maria Canals Competition in Spain and the Cleveland International Piano Competition in the USA, and has won several prizes.

SEASON 2011/2012