The Academy of St Martin in the Fields is a chamber orchestra founded in 1959 in London by conductor Neville Marriner, who was also its president until his death in 2016. The ensemble’s unusual name is taken from the London church where it gave its first public concerts. With its polished ensemble playing, perfection of style, and highly cultivated sound, during its more than 60 years of existence it has established itself as one of the world’s best chamber orchestras, and it has long been unparalleled in its interpretations of Mozart’s music, in particular. It gives concerts regularly across most of Europe, with illustrious conductors and soloists. One of the world’s most-recorded ensembles, it has more than 500 recordings to its credit on several different labels. Its best-selling album remains the soundtrack to Miloš Forman’s film Amadeus. Its present music director is the violin virtuoso, Joshua Bell.

The Israeli clarinettist Sharon Kam is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, where she studied with Charles Neidich. She made her orchestral debut at the age of sixteen with the Israel Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta. After winning the ARD International Music Competition in Munich in 1992, she began receiving invitations to perform with the most famous orchestras of Europe, the United States, and Japan. On the occasion of the gala celebration of W. A. Mozart’s 250^th birthday, she played his Clarinet Concerto in A Major on a live television broadcast that was seen in thirty-three countries around the world. She devotes herself intensively to chamber music in collaboration with Heinrich Schiff, Christian Tetzlaff, and Leonidas Kavakos. She is a dedicated promoter of contemporary music, having given the world premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Concerto for Clarinet and String Trio, for example. Besides the classical and modern concert repertoire, she also occasionally performs jazz.