Leszek Barwinski-Brown

Chief Executive Officer

When the Lang Lang International Music Foundation® was started, we set out with one mission – to change the face of music education in public schools. Our dream was to educate, inspire, and motivate the next generation of music lovers.

In 1997, Mr. Barwinsk-Brown was appointed Director of Creative Marketing at the global headquarters of Philips Classics International in Amsterdam. He was responsible for creative marketing (products, design) and branding for artists all over the world, including figures such as Sir John Elliot Gardiner, Sylvia McNair, Victoria Mullova, Mitsuko Uchida, Alfred Brendel, Valery Gergiev, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Andrea Bocelli, Sir Simon Rattle, Leila Josefowicz. In 1998-1999 he participated in the world’s largest phonographic project of piano music: Great Pianists of the 20th Century, a collection of 200 CD’s which included recordings from Sony Classics, EMI, RCA, Deutsche Grammophon, Decca Music, Teldec, Warner Music.

In 1999, he was appointed the Director of the Classical and Jazz Division of Universal Music Austria in Vienna, where he worked until 2010. His responsibilities included budgeting, promoting, and developing the market share of music labels such as Deutsche Grammophon, Decca Music Group, Philips Classics, Emercy Classics, Amadeo, Verve, Impulse!, Concorde, MPS in Austria. During this time, he collaborated on the project “Concert for Europe,” featuring the Wiener Philharmoniker, conducted by Zubin Mehta with Lang Lang as the soloist (2005), Plácido Domingo with Juan Diego Floréz as the soloist (2006), Georges Prêtre (2008), and Daniel Barenboim (2009).

These open-air concerts played for an audience of over 90,000 people at the Imperial Summer Residence of Schönbrunn, Vienna. Today these concerts are broadcast live for hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

He also worked with the Austrian national radio station Ö1 on compiling the most extensive encyclopedic anthology of classical music, Ö1 Klassiker. This collection comprised of over 100 CD’s, which the Ministry of Education adopted as teaching material for public schools.

His promotional work of the Wiener Philharmoniker New Year’s Concerts CD’s and DVD’s, which featured conductors such as: Seiji Ozawa (2002), Nikolaus Harnoncourt (2003), Riccardo Muti (2004), Lorin Maazel (2005), Mariss Jansons (2006), Zubin Mehta (2007), Georges Prêtre (2008, 2010), Daniel Barenboim (2009), resulted in each of the CD’s topping the music charts in Austria, and becoming a double or triple platinum album.

In 2004, he co-founded the Classical Clubbing project, a series of classical music meetings for young people in Vienna that led to increased interest in classical music and received significant press and television publicity.

In 2010, Mr. Barwinski-Brown became the first Casting Director in Poland at the Polish National Opera in Warsaw– the Teatr Wielki. His work brought world renowned artists such as, Renee Fleming and Edita Gruberova, to Poland for the first time.