Charlie Siem is one of today’s foremost violinists, with such a wide-ranging diversity of cross- cultural appeal as to have played a large part in defining what it means to be a true artist of the 21st century. Born in London, to a Norwegian father and British mother, Siem began to play the violin at the age of three after hearing a broadcast of Yehudi Menuhin playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. He received a broad and thorough education from Eton College, before completing the intellectually demanding undergraduate degree programme in Music at the University of Cambridge. From 1998 to 2004, he studied the violin with Itzhak Rashkovsky in London at the Royal College of Music, and since 2004 has been mentored by Shlomo Mintz.
Siem has appeared with many of the world’s finest orchestras and chamber ensembles, including: the Bergen Philharmonic, the Camerata Salzburg, the Czech National Symphony, the Israel Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Moscow Philharmonic, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Rotterdam Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, MDR Leipzig, Camerata Salzburg. He has worked with top conductors including: Charles Dutoit, Dennis Russell Davies, Edward Gardner, Zubin Mehta, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Sir Roger Norrington, Libor Pešek and Yuri Simonov. International festival appearances to date include: Spoleto, St. Moritz, Gstaad, Bergen, Tine@Munch, Festival Internacional de Santa Lucía, and the Windsor Festival. Siem’s regular sonata partner is renowned pianist Itamar Golan.
Charlie Siem has a varied discography and has made a number recordings, including with the London Symphony Orchestra (Warner Classics, 2011) and Münchner Rundfunkorchester (Sony Classical, 2014). Recent recordings include Between the Clouds (Signum Records, 2020) featuring works by Kreisler, Sarasate, Paganini, Elgar and Wieniawski, showcasing Siem’s versatility and virtuosity in an intimate Parisian-style ‘salon’ programme, and an album of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and Romances (Sigum Records, 2022) with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Oleg Caetani.
A great believer in giving to worthwhile causes, Siem is an ambassador of The Prince’s Trust. He is also a Visiting Professor at Leeds College of Music in the UK, and Nanjing University of the Arts in China. He gives masterclasses around the world at top institutions such as the Royal College of Music in London, and the Accademia di Musica in Florence. Passionate about bringing classical music to new audiences around the world, in addition to his classical performance career Siem has revived the age-old violinistic tradition of composing virtuosic variations of popular themes, which he has done alongside artists including Bryan Adams, Jamie Cullum and The Who. In 2014, he wrote his first composition – Canopy, for solo violin and string orchestra – which was commissioned by the USA television station CBS Watch! and recorded with the English Chamber Orchestra. Siem has also had numerous collaborations with fashion brands including: Armani, Chanel, Dior, Dunhill, Hugo Boss and Loro Piana.
Charlie Siem plays the 1735 Guarneri del Gesù violin, known as the D’Egville.

The Philharmonia Orchestra is a world-class symphony orchestra for the 21st century. Led by its Principal Conductor & Artistic Advisor Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Philharmonia creates thrilling performances in the concert hall and reaches new listeners and participants through audience development projects, digital technology, and a learning and participation programme. Based in London, with residencies throughout England, a thriving international touring schedule and global digital reach, the Philharmonia engages with a worldwide audience. In May 2019, the Philharmonia announced that 33-year-old Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali is to be its next Principal Conductor, taking over from Salonen from the 2021/22 season.
The Orchestra’s home is Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, in the heart of London, where the Philharmonia has been resident since 1995 and presents a season of around 50 performances each year. Orchestral programming is complemented by series including Philharmonia at the Movies, Music of Today, the Philharmonia Chamber Players and an Insights programme.
Under Salonen and other key conductors, the Philharmonia has created a series of critically-acclaimed, visionary projects, distinctive for both their artistic scope and supporting live and digital content. Recent series include City of Light: Paris 1900-1950 (2015) and Stravinsky: Myths & Rituals (2016), which won a South Bank Sky Arts Award. In 2019, Salonen presents Weimar Berlin: Bittersweet Metropolis, a celebration of the feverish creativity of the Weimar era through the prism of its music, drama and film. The Philharmonia is orchestra-in-residence at venues and festivals across England, and has a diverse UK touring programme that regularly takes the Orchestra to the BBC Proms, Edinburgh International Festival and St David’s Hall in Cardiff. The Philharmonia’s residencies are at Bedford Corn Exchange, De Montfort Hall in Leicester, The Marlowe in Canterbury, The Anvil in Basingstoke (where it is Orchestra in Partnership), the Three Choirs Festival in the West of England, and Garsington Opera.
At the heart of the Orchestra’s residencies is an education programme that empowers people in every community to engage with, and participate in, orchestral music. Its flagship Orchestra Unwrapped project for schools encompasses concerts, in-school workshops and teacher training, delivered in partnership with Music Hubs; intergenerational creative music-making community project Hear and Now brings together people living with dementia and their carers with young musicians; and urban-classical project Symphonize engages vulnerable teenagers. The Orchestra works with a wide range of higher education institutions across its residencies, including with their Strategic Partner in Leicester, De Montfort University, which brings a wealth of opportunities for students.
Internationally, the Philharmonia is active across Europe, Asia and the USA. With Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Orchestra has recently undertaken major tours to Taiwan, Japan and the USA, and a residency at Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, in summer 2019. A five-concert European tour with Salonen and Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, in September 2017, saw the Philharmonia perform for the first time at the new Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.
In the 2018/19 season the Orchestra performed extensively in Europe and undertook three major international tours. Salonen leads a tour to China and South Korea in October 2018. The Philharmonia travels to Cartagena, Colombia, in January 2019, in a project that brings together live performances and digital installation Universe of Sound. And in March 2019, Salonen leads a US tour that features two performances at Lincoln Center, New York, and visits CAL Performances in Berkeley, California.
The Philharmonia’s international reputation in part derives from its extraordinary recording legacy, which in the last 10 years has been built on by its pioneering work with digital technology. Two giant audio-visual walk-through installation experiences, RE-RITE (2009, based on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring) and Universe of Sound: The Planets (2012) have introduced hundreds of thousands of people across the world to the symphony orchestra, while more recently, the Philharmonia and Esa-Pekka Salonen have blazed a trail for classical music in Virtual Reality. VR experiences featuring music by Sibelius, Mahler and Beethoven, placing the viewer at the heart of the orchestra, have been presented at Southbank Centre, at the Ravinia (Chicago), Bergen and Cheltenham Festivals, and at the SXSW Conference and Festival in Austin, Texas. The Orchestra’s 2018/19 London Season opens with a new, audio-led VR installation, VR Sound Stage, which is presented for free in the foyer of Royal Festival Hall.
The Philharmonia records and releases music across multiple channels and media. An app for iPad, The Orchestra, has sold tens of thousands of copies. Composers including Brian Tyler, Steven Price, James Newton Howard and Christopher Lennertz choose to record their scores for films, video games and television series with the Orchestra (recent credits include the new Formula 1 theme, Lost in Space (Netflix), The Mummy and Baby Driver). The Orchestra’s VR 360 Experience is available on PlayStation VR. The Philharmonia is Classic FM’s ‘Orchestra on Tour’ and broadcasts extensively on BBC Radio 3; with Signum Records the Philharmonia releases live recordings of signature concerts; and the Orchestra’s YouTube channel has 60,000 subscribers. In October 2017 a live stream of Mahler’s Third Symphony, conducted by Salonen was experienced by a worldwide audience.
The Philharmonia’s investment in technological innovation has been a catalyst for its award-winning audience development projects, which are united by the concept of taking symphonic music out of the concert hall and presenting it in new contexts. The Orchestra has won four Royal Philharmonic Society awards for its digital projects and audience engagement work. RE-RITE and Universe of Sound were at the heart of a major two-year audience development and education initiative, iOrchestra (2014-15), which took place in South-West England and engaged over 120,000 people.
The Philharmonia was founded in 1945 by EMI producer Walter Legge, and in its first 30 years worked with a who’s who of twentieth century music, especially in the recording studio. Otto Klemperer, Riccardo Muti (the first two of only five Principal Conductors), Herbert von Karajan, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Richard Strauss, Arturo Toscanini, Guido Cantelli and Carlo Maria Giulini are just a few of the great artists to be associated with the Philharmonia. The members of the Philharmonia took over ownership of the orchestra in 1964 (which was known as the New Philharmonia until 1977) and it has been self-governing ever since. Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen has been Principal Conductor & Artistic Advisor of the Orchestra since 2008. Santtu-Matias Rouvali is Principal Conductor Designate, succeeding Salonen in 2021. Jakub Hrůša is Principal Guest Conductor; Christoph von Dohnányi is Honorary Conductor for Life and Vladimir Ashkenazy is Conductor Laureate. Composer Unsuk Chin is Artistic Director of the Music of Today series.
As well as its membership of 80 players from all around the world, the Philharmonia’s Emerging Artists programme develops the next generation of composers and instrumentalists. Composers' Academy champions three developing composers each year; the Philharmonia MMSF Instrumental Fellowship Programme supports instrumentalists seeking an orchestral career and connects them to the wider life of the Orchestra and the expertise within its membership.

Oleg Caetani is an opera and concert conductor. He finds these two aspects of his work equally important.
Caetani considers Nadia Boulanger to be the driving inspiration of his career. She discovered his talent, initiated him to music and gave him the philosophical approach to life, linked to Montaigne, that he still has today.
At the Rome Conservatory of Santa Cecilia he attended Franco Ferrara’s conducting class and studied composition with Irma Ravinale. At the age of 17, he made his theatre debut with a production of Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and other madrigals that he organized himself. After studying all the Shostakovich Symphonies with Kondrashin at the Moscow Conservatory, he graduated with Mussin at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with maximum votes, conducting Shostakovich’s fifth symphony. Winner of the RAI Turin competition and Karajan Competition in Berlin, he started his career at the Berlin State Opera “Unter den Linden” as repetiteur and assistant of Otmar Suitner. That experience in a great German opera house with all Wagner and Strauss works gave a decisive turn to his repertoire.
Caetani’s deep experience, now of almost thirty years, in the opera repertoire by Verdi, Mussorgsky and Wagner (including several Ring productions) has influenced his approach to the great works also symphonic works, of the twentieth century (particularly Bartok, the second Viennese school and the French impressionism).
The first opera Caetani conducted at the age of 24, was Eugene Onegin in 1981, when graduating from St. Petersburg’s Conservatory. Since then has Tchaikovsky played an important role in his repertoire. He conducted new productions of Orleanskaya Deva (Joan of Arch) in Strasbourg (first performance in France in 1998), The Queen of Spades with J. Schaaf in Stuttgart, and Nutcracker with the Swiss architect Mario Botta in Zürich. He recently recorded all Tchaikovsky’s Symphonies including Manfred (2008). The Financial Times wrote: “Do we need another set of Tchaikovsky symphonies? Having listened and re-listened to these live recordings, the answer is an emphatic yes. Caetani is not an indulgent Tchaikovskyan... he lets Tchaikovsky speak for himself: the contrapuntal rigour, the emotional tenderness, the occasional hint of hysteria within a classical structure... a treasure at any price”.
After conducting Oedipe by Enescu as his first professional opera performance in 1983, Caetani has endeavoured to conduct the wonderfully original music of Enescu whenever possible. As a result, following his performances of Oedipe as opening of the 2009 Enescu Festival in 2009, he received the legion of honor of the Romanian Republic for performing Enescu’s music around the world.
Caetani has also devoted himself to recording and conducting other less-known composers of the twentieth century such as Mossolov, Pizzetti, Gerhard etc.
Since the studying time, Shostakovich’s music has a central role in his repertoire. Caetani translated the libretto of The Nose in German for his production in Frankfurt in 1991. He conducted the Italian premiere of the operetta Moscow Cheriomushki in 2007 and has conducted many first performances of Shostakovich’s symphonies all over the world as well as recording Italy’s first complete cycle of Shostakovich symphonies with the Verdi Orchestra in Milan. The CDs have won several prizes: 10/10 from Classical Today in USA, ffff Télérama in France and Record Geijutsu in Japan.
Since 1999 Caetani has a particularly close relationship with the Sydney Symphony, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Verdi Orchestra and with them he has also toured in South America (2003) and Spain (2009). In April 2008, he conducted the Verdi Orchestra in a concert presented by the Italian President to Pope Benedetto XVI. in the Vatican which was recorded live for Eurovision TV.
In 2001 he made his debut at La Scala, Milan with Turandot, returning there in 2005 to conduct Otello. He opened the 2001 season of the Theatre of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino with Don Pasquale.
Recent engagements have included Vaughan Williams’ Sir John In Love and Khovanchina at the English National Opera, a company with which Caetani has a particularly close relationship, The Flying Dutchman at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, L’enfant et les sortilèges at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, La voix humaine coupled with The Bluebeard Castle and Don Carlos in Köln, Madama Butterfly in Berlin and in London at the ENO etc. He regularly conducts orchestras such as Staatskapelle Dresden, Munich Philharmonic, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Gewandhausorchester, Wiener Symphoniker (with whom he has recorded Poliuto by Donizetti for Emi-Cbs), Orchestre National de Radio France, the RAI National Symphonic Orchestra, l’Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Yomiuri Orchestra, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow etc.