Baiba Skride

Violinist Baiba Skride leveraged her early triumphs in major contests to build a worldwide presence on the concert stage, where she also maintains a strong reputation as a chamber performer. Born in Riga on February 19, 1981, she grew up immersed in music: her grandmother provided the initial lessons for Baiba and her sisters, Lauma on piano and Linda on viola, and the three siblings have sustained joint performances into adulthood. Her mother worked as a pianist while her father served as a choral conductor, and by the age of five Baiba was already appearing in public on the violin. In 1995 she entered a specialized school for gifted young musicians in Riga before continuing studies at the Rostock Conservatory in Germany, traveling between the two cities during that period; Petru Munteanu guided her work there, and she supplemented her training through master classes with Ruggiero Ricci and Lewis Kaplan. Competition successes that began with a youth prize in Bulgaria in 1988 reached their peak when she claimed first place at the 2001 Queen Elisabeth Violin Competition in Brussels, an achievement that opened doors to concerto engagements with leading ensembles across Europe, North America, and Asia, among them the Berlin Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Tokyo Philharmonic. In chamber settings she has collaborated with cellists Sol Gabetta and Alban Gerhardt as well as harpist Xavier de Maistre and numerous others; for several years she played the 1734 “Ex Baron Feilitzsch” Stradivarius once owned by Gidon Kremer. A steady recording artist, Skride joined the Sony Classical roster in her early twenties, stepping into the spot vacated by Hilary Hahn upon the latter’s move to Deutsche Grammophon; her debut release paired Mozart and Haydn violin concertos with the Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Chamber Orchestra. Two Sony albums earned Echo Klassik awards, and after issuing Souvenir Russe in 2008 she moved to the Orfeo label, maintaining an almost yearly schedule of new recordings. While her focus has remained on core repertory, she appeared on a 2018 Ondine album devoted to Heino Eller’s violin concerto and that same year released performances of concertos by Bernstein, Korngold, and Miklós Rózsa. In 2020 she recorded Mozart’s complete set of five violin concertos with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra led by Eivind Aadland, supplying her own newly composed cadenzas. She returned to Orfeo in 2022 with Violin Unlimited, a collection of works for solo violin, and in 2024 presented Britten’s Violin Concerto with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony under Marin Alsop.