In Profile: Janine Jansen

Janine was born in the Netherlands, and first picked up a violin at the age of six. She comes from a family full of musicians. and of her childhood recalls, ‘all my first memories are musical – I remember nothing else. My grandfather conducted a church choir, my father was his organist and they used to give concerts every Saturday afternoon, so I was in church a great deal of the time. I was singing in the choir before I could read, standing next to my mum.’

Janine has had an extremely enviable career, having had opportunities to work with the world’s greatest orchestras (including the New York Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Berliner Philharmoniker) and conductors (Sir Mark Elder, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Valery Gergiev, Daniel Harding and Sir Antonio Pappano). She gained international acclaim when she opened the 2005 BBC Proms with a performance of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Nine years later, in 2014, she was the Featured Artist at the BBC Proms, culminating in an appearance at the Last Night of the Proms

Janine made her LSO debut in 2006, under conductor Roland Boer, with Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra. She has been a regular soloist ever since, performing at the Barbican and on tour, recording with the orchestra and appearing in the BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert series at LSO St Luke’s.

In recent years, Janine has appeared as part of the LSO’s International Violin Festival in June 2015, and featured as the subject of 2017’s LSO Artist Portrait, taking on different interpretations of the violin concerto with Bernstein’s Serenade and Berg’s Violin Concerto. Last season she was part of the LSO’s tour to Japan and South Korea, performing the Szymanowski and Sibelius Violin Concerto, and this summer she joined the Orchestra on tour to Lübeck, Neumünster and Wiesbaden.

‘I love playing with the LSO,’ she says. ‘There’s so much there, so much focus and energy. It has been quite a few years since I started working with them and every time is such a joy and very much an inspiration. It is wonderful when that happens; when you really make music together.’

This article was originally posted on 25 January 2017 and has been updated.