Madara Petersone is unusually versatile as a musician, having been active as a violinist, saxophonist, composer, and choral singer. She served as the concertmaster of the renowned chamber orchestra Kremerata Baltica and continues to collaborate with its founder, violinist Gidon Kremer. Petersone was born in Latvia in 1989 and took up the piano at age nine in the capital of Riga. Later, she took up the saxophone and violin, continuing to perform professionally on all three instruments. Petersone attended music school in Latvia, studying various instruments and taking music history and theory classes. Encouraged by a professor, she studied composition as well, and when she entered one of her pieces in the Latvian ARENA 2010 composition, she was surprised to find that she won second prize. She began to collaborate with colleagues and professionals in developing her compositional voice and enrolled in a graduate program in composition at the Latvian Academy of Music in Riga. She also attended workshops and master classes at home and abroad, including the Cheltenham Composers Academy in England. In 2016-2017, Petersone studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin as an exchange student, and she stayed in Berlin under an Erasmus internship, studying and performing with two gamelan ensembles headquartered at the Indonesian embassy in Berlin. She also sings with the female choir Via Stella, and from 2013 to 2017, she played saxophone in the Latvia University Wind Band. Petersone's organ composition Time Stays, We Go was entered in the Carl Orff Competition in 2019. For several years, as a violinist, Petersone served as the concertmaster of Kremerata Baltica, and she has continued to work with violinist Kremer, the orchestra's founder. In 2021, she joined Kremer on a recording of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Sonata for two violins on the Accentus label. ~ James Manheim