Thomas Zehetmair has fashioned a highly successful and broadly eclectic career. He is a virtuoso violinist of international repute, a chamber player who has founded a critically acclaimed quartet, a conductor of front-rank status, and a musician whose repertory in any role reaches from Baroque-era fare to the contemporary. As of the mid-2020s, Zehetmair held the conductorships of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre National d'Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, and the Irish Chamber Orchestra. He also holds the title of conductor laureate of the Royal Northern Sinfonia. Zehetmair was born in Salzburg, Austria, on November 23, 1961. He began violin lessons at five with his parents, both talented violinists. His advanced studies were at the Salzburg Mozarteum under his father, Helmut. He took further instruction on the violin from Nathan Milstein and Max Rostal. Zehetmair made his recording debut in the late '70s with a recording of music by Mozart and worked busily at establishing an international reputation throughout the '80s, and, by 1990, he regularly appeared to acclaim at major concert venues from New York to Berlin to Tokyo. In 1993, he took on his first conducting post when he became co-director of the Camerata Bern. The following year, he founded the Zehetmair Quartet, consequently dividing his time among solo performances, chamber concerts, and conducting. His repertoire spans from Baroque-era fare, particularly Bach, up through Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, and extending to Bartók, Schoenberg, and Berg, as well as to contemporary composers such as Heinz Holliger, Valentin Silvestrov, and Wilhelm Killmayer. In the concertos of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and other pre-modern composers, Zehetmair often provides his own cadenzas, and in these works and those of Bach, he frequently appears as soloist while conducting the orchestra. He employs historic performance practices in early works, having studied such details with Nikolaus Harnoncourt. In the chamber realm, he has collaborated with world-class musicians, including pianists Alfred Brendel and Cyprien Katsaris and violinist Gidon Kremer. As a soloist, Zehetmair has appeared with leading orchestras across the globe, including the Vienna Philharmonic, the NHK Symphony (Tokyo), and the Boston Symphony, among many others. Zehetmair was the music director of the Northern Sinfonia from 2002 to 2014 (renamed the Royal Northern Sinfonia in 2013), after which he was named conductor laureate. He was the music director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris from 2012 to 2014. From 2016 to 2021, he was the principal conductor of the Musikkollegium Winterthur. Zehetmair took up the post of chief conductor of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra in 2019, followed shortly by an appointment as the principal conductor of the Orchestre National d'Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, beginning in 2021. The following year, he was named the principal conductor and artistic director of the Irish Chamber Orchestra. Zehetmair has made numerous recordings spread over a variety of labels, including EMI, Philips, and Warner Classics. In 2019, he issued an album of Bach's solo sonatas and partitas for violin on ECM New Series and led the Musikkollegium Winterthur on a recording of Brahms' Symphonies. He returned to ECM New Series in 2023 with violist Ruth Killius and the Royal Northern Sinfonia on a recording of music by Bartók, Beethoven, and John Casken. ~ Robert Cummings & Keith Finke, Rovi