Biography

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.

Recent highlights include critically acclaimed performances of Shostakovich’s violin concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelsons, and with the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester as part of the inaugural Shostakovich Festival. In North America, Skride is a frequent guest with major orchestras including Houston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Utah Symphony, and Baltimore Symphony.

In 2025, Baiba Skride released the recording <em>Shostakovich Violin Concertos</em> with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons on Deutsche Grammophon. The recording was nominated for an Opus Klassik Award in the category of Best Concert Recording. With Orfeo, she released Gubaidulina’s Triple Concerto with the NDR Radiophilharmonie (Hannover) and Andrew Manze and Britten’s Violin Concerto and Double Concerto with the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien and Marin Alsop.

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 concertos 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.