Press

The Tone Fairy
Classical discovery Baiba Skride bewitches silver tones from her violin

20 years of concert experience: The Latvian Baiba Skride made her debut performance as a 3-year-old, at that time along with her sisters.

The young woman from Latvia lifts her precious Stradivarius violin to her chin and plays the tricky Chaconne from a Bach Partita. The concert hall fills with a silvery, shimmering sound. An unmistakable sound, which causes Baiba Skride to be lifted up on waves of applause on the occasion of her first performance at the Salzburg Mozarteum Festival. Again and again she returns to the stage, gives glorious encores.
Along with Chinese piano virtuoso Lang Lang, Baiba Skride may well be the classical discovery of the year. (Vogue, December 2004)

On her way to violin paradise
Her trademark is her dense, clear tone: The violinist Baiba Skride is the heiress of Hillary Hahn.

Baiba Skride has brought out a solo CD for her debut. For violinists this is a great deal more risky than for pianists. And: She plays Bach on it. As if in recording this "New Testament for Violin" she carried the gravity of the world on her shoulders. Skride builds a musical cathedral of bricks, into which she allows light to fall pointedly and effectually. Unpretentious, unobtrusively but still dense in tone and clever in concept. Her music becomes flesh as the technical demands increase, for example in Eugène-Auguste Ysaye's G-minor sonata and particularly in the presto movement of Bartók's violin sonata. Here Skride's emotional angularity is captivating. Her second debut dressed in classic battle dress is more comprehensible – but also more boring. It is Mozart for the masses. She interprets the violin evergreen, the 3rd violin concert, smoothly, turns Schubert's A-major Rondo into a warm-up exercise and ascends to violin paradise with Michael Haydn's B-major concert. Here Skride's trademark is also clear: A certain, clear sound developed from the mass of tones. (Welt am Sonntag, September 5, 2004)