BIOGRAPHY
Estonian Grammy Award-winning conductor Paavo Järvi is widely recognised as one of today’s most eminent conductors, enjoying close partnerships with the finest orchestras around the world. He serves as Music Director of the Tonhalle Orchester-Zürich, as the long-standing Artistic Director of The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen since 2004, and as both the founder and Artistic Director of the Estonian Festival Orchestra.
Highlights of Paavo Järvi’s sixth season as Music Director of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich include performances of Bruckner Symphony No.1 and Mahler Symphonies Nos 1 & 7, as well as Archora by this year’s creative chair, Anna Thorvaldsdorttir, and John Adams’ piano concerto After the Fall with season focus artist Víkingur Ólafsson. Further highlights include a tour of Spain in October and guest performances in Hamburg, Paris, Frankfurt and Cologne in March. The season closes with a new bi-annual summer festival called tonhalleAIR, in which Paavo Järvi leads programmes with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, as well as the student orchestra of the Musikschule Konservatorium Zürich. Alpha Classics releases Bruckner Symphony No.9 in September, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth, followed in Spring 2025 by Mahler Symphony No.5, the first release in a complete cycle which will span the seasons to follow.
2024 celebrates Paavo Järvi’s 20th anniversary as Artistic Director of The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, recently voted Gramophone Orchestra of the Year. Together they have performed and recorded benchmark performances of the complete orchestral works by Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms. Highlights in the 2024/25 season include extensive tours throughout Japan, South Korea and Europe and the release of Volume 2 in the Haydn London Symphonies project on RCA Red Seal.
Each season concludes with two weeks of performances and conducting masterclasses at the Pärnu Music Festival in Estonia, which Paavo Järvi founded in 2011. The success of both the Festival and its resident ensemble – the Estonian Festival Orchestra – has led to profile tours across Asia and Europe, including performances at the Berlin Philharmonie, Wiener Konzerthaus, BBC Proms and Hamburg Elbphilharmonie. In Spring 2024 Alpha Classics released their fifth album, Ship of Fools, featuring premieres of three new orchestral works by leading Estonian composer, Jüri Reinvere.
In addition to his permanent positions, Järvi is much in demand as a guest conductor, regularly appearing with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Philharmonia and the New York Philharmonic. This season, Järvi also conducts the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Staatskapelle Berlin, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, Shanghai Symphony and Hong Kong Philharmonic. He also continues to enjoy close relationships with many of the orchestras of which he was previously Music Director, including Orchestre de Paris, Frankfurt Radio Symphony and NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo.
In 2024 Paavo Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich received an International Classical Music Award for their recording of Bruckner Symphony No.8 on Alpha Classics. With the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, he has won both the 2024 Opus Klassik and 2023 Gramophone “Orchestra or the Year” award, as well as the 2019 Rheingau Music Prize and Opus Klassik Conductor of the Year. Other prizes and honours include a Grammy Award for his recording of Sibelius’s Cantatas with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, Gramophone and Diapason Artist of the Year (2015) and Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres awarded by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2015 Paavo Järvi was also presented with the Sibelius Medal in recognition of his work in bringing the Finnish composer’s music to a wider public and, in 2012, he received the Hindemith Prize for Art and Humanity. As a dedicated supporter of Estonian culture, Paavo Järvi was awarded the Order of the White Star by the President of Estonia in 2013.