Baiba Skride

Baiba Skride’s natural approach to music-making has endeared her to many of today’s most prestigious conductors and orchestras worldwide. She performs regularly with orchestras such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Concertgebouworkest, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Orchestre de Paris, London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and NHK Symphony Orchestra. She enjoys close collaborations with conductors such as Marin Alsop, Christoph Eschenbach, Edward Gardner, Susanna Mälkki, Andris Nelsons, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Dima Slobodeniouk, John Storgårds, Juraj Valčuha, and Kazuki Yamada.

Upcoming highlights include Skride’s return to the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Andris Nelsons appearing in concerts in Boston and on tour in Vienna, Prague, and Riga. She will perform both Shostakovich violin concertos as well as chamber music at the historically unique Shostakovich Festival in Leipzig in May 2025, in partnership with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In addition, she will appear as soloist on tour in Spain with Orquesta Sinfónica de Euskadi and Kristiina Poska as well as with Kammerakademie Potsdam and Joshua Weilerstein, among others. Recent highlights include her much-anticipated return to Berliner Philharmoniker, Philharmonia Orchestra, hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt, Dresdner Philharmonie, and Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. In North America she regularly appears with orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Houston Symphony, Utah Symphony, and Baltimore Symphony.

This season, Deutsche Grammophon releases Baiba Skride’s recording of the Shostakovich violin concertos with Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons. In addition, her recording of Gubaidulina’s Triple Concerto with NDR Radiophilharmonie (Hannover) and Andrew Manze will also be released this season on the Orfeo label. In Spring 2024, her recording of Britten's violin and double concertos with ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien and Marin Alsop, received excellent reviews. BBC Music Magazine praised Skride for her 'subtlety of phrasing and range of tonal palette,' highlighting her stature as a Romantic player. Her extensive discography with Orfeo includes all Mozart concertos with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Bartók with WDR Sinfonieorchester, and works by Bernstein, Korngold, and Rózsa with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Santtu-Matias Rouvali.

Baiba Skride is an internationally sought-after chamber musician and performs regularly at festivals and concert halls across the world, including the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Musikverein Wien, Wigmore Hall London, Louvre Paris, as well as touring in North America and Australia. Skride is an advocate of new music and some of today's most prominent composers, including Sofia Gubaidulina, Victoria Borisova-Ollas, Sebastian Currier, and Hans Abrahamsen, have written concerti for her.

Skride was born into a musical Latvian family in Riga and continued her studies from 1995 with Petru Munteanu at the Rostock University of Music and Theatre. She plays the 'Yfrah Neaman' Stradivarius kindly on loan by the Neaman family through Beare’s International Violin Society.