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In more than forty years before the public, Jaime Laredo has excelled in the multiple roles of soloist, conductor, recitalist and chamber musician. Since his stunning orchestral debut at the age of eleven with the San Francisco Symphony, he has won the admiration and respect of audiences, critics and fellow musicians with his passionate and polished performances. That debut inspired one critic to write: 'In the 1920's it was Yehudi Menuhin; in the 1930's it was Isaac Stern; and last night it was Jaime Laredo.' His education and development were greatly influenced by private coaching with such musicians as Josef Gingold, Pablo Casals, Ivan Galamian and George Szell. At the age of seventeen, Jaime Laredo won the prestigious Queen Elisabeth of Belgium Competition, launching his rise to international prominence.
The 2005-06 season is in many ways a high point for Jaime Laredo. Mr. Laredo has accepted a chaired position at the Indiana University School of Music, that began in September '05. Also this season, as he has for the past twenty-eight years, Mr. Laredo interweaves solo and conducting dates with the dense chamber music schedule of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, Winner of Musical America's Ensemble of the Year 2002.
To celebrate the important milestone of the Trio's 30th anniversary in Fall 2006, there is a variety of concerts, presentations, and recordings, including performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and the 92nd Street Y in New York. In addition, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio sustain a heavy schedule with dates in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Dallas, Portland, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts, as well as two European tours in November 2005 and May 2006, covering Great Britain (Wigmore Hall, London), Lisbon, Amsterdam, Spain, Wales, Germany and the Netherlands.
Mr. Laredo is in demand worldwide as a conductor and a soloist. He has been Music Director of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra since 1999 and is also the Artistic Director of the Brandenberg Ensemble. The 2005-06 season sees him leading the Detroit Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, New York String Orchestra and Virginia Symphony, as well as soloing with the St. Louis Symphony in October 2005.
In past seasons Mr. Laredo's guest engagements have included performances with all of America's major orchestras, including Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia, with such conductors as Barenboim, Mehta, Ozawa, Slatkin, Colin Davis and great conductors of the past, such as Ormandy, Leinsdorf, Stokowski, and Szell. Abroad, Mr. Laredo has performed as soloist and/or conductor with the London Symphony, the BBC Symphony, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the Royal Philharmonic, and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which he led on two American tours and in their Hong Kong Festival debut. His numerous recordings with the SCO include Vivaldi's Four Seasons (which stayed on the British best-seller charts for over a year), Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the "Italian" and "Scottish" Symphonies of Mendelssohn, Beethoven's Violin Concerto and recordings of Rossini overtures and Wagner's Siegfried Idyll.
Mr. Laredo has recorded close to one hundred discs. He has received the Deutsche Schallplatten Prize and has been afforded seven Grammy nominations. He won the Grammy Award for a disc of Brahms Piano Quartets which he performed with his frequent chamber music collaborators Emanuel Ax, Isaac Stern and Yo-Yo Ma. Mr. Laredo's discs on CBS and RCA have included the complete Bach Sonatas with the late Glenn Gould and an Arabesque Recordings album of duos with Ms. Robinson featuring works by Handel, Kodály, Mozart and Ravel. His releases on the audiophile Dorian label include Schubert's complete works for violin and piano with Stephanie Brown, and Virtuoso!, a collection of favorite violin encores with pianist Margo Garrett. Other releases include Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante and Concertone with Cho-Liang Lin for Sony Classical and Piano Quartet recordings with Ax, Stern and Ma featuring the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Fauré. Arabesque Recordings released the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio's two-CD set of the chamber works of Maurice Ravel and the complete trios and sonatas of Shostakovich.
Jaime Laredo is on an unusually large number of CDs released in the 2002-03 season. In August 2002, Koch International released an all-Zwilich concerto CD with Mr. Laredo, Sharon Robinson and Joseph Kalichstein as the soloists, including a double concerto written for Laredo and Robinson, and a triple concerto written for the Trio. The summer of 2003 saw the release of the premiere recording of Richard Danielpour's In the Arms of the Beloved, a concerto for violin and cello written for Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson in honor of their 25th anniversary and premiered in April 2002, with Conductor Michael Stern and the Iris Orchestra, who join Laredo and Robinson on the recording. This is paired with Danielpour's piano trio A Child's Reliquary, written for and performed by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. Arabesque also released a two-volume, 4-CD all-Beethoven collection.
As Artistic Director of New York's renowned Chamber Music at the Y series, Mr. Laredo has created an important forum for chamber music performances which has developed a devoted following. His stewardships of the annual New York String Orchestra Seminar at Carnegie Hall and International Violin Competition of Indianapolis have become beloved educational pillars of the string community. A principal figure at the Marlboro Music Festival in years past and more recently with the Aspen Music Festival, he is actively involved at Tanglewood, Ravinia, Mostly Mozart, and the Hollywood Bowl, as well as the festivals in Italy, Spain, Finland, Greece, Israel, Austria, Switzerland and England.
Born in Bolivia, Jaime Laredo, together with wife Sharon Robinson, resides in Vermont.
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