Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra announces 2023-24 season
A wide variety of programming, plus an extraordinary Bruckner cycle
The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s 2023-24 season will offer a wide variety of programmes that reach out to music lovers of all ages and walks of life. A unique and extraordinary Bruckner cycle will celebrate the composer’s 200th birthday. In addition to music from the classical and romantic repertoires, the programmes will include music by seventeen living composers. The orchestra will also intensify its work with today’s top conductors, including artistic partner and future chief conductor Klaus Mäkelä, who will conduct six programmes.
A variety of concert formats for a variety of audiences
The Concertgebouw Orchestra’s 2023-24 season features concerts for people of all ages and from all walks of life. As in 2022, the orchestra will kick off the new season with Opening Night, a free open-air concert at a spectacular location in Amsterdam. The Inside Out format, launched last February, had the audience members interspersed among the musicians, all of them surrounding conductor Iván Fischer. It was such a huge success, particularly among younger music fans, that it will be repeated twice on 5 October with works by Debussy, Satie and Ravel. The orchestra is delighted to be holding its popular crossover concerts in the Bijlmer Klassiek series again this season, in collaboration with the Bijlmer Parktheater. Two of the six concerts in the Essentials series, which has been attracting new audiences for years, will be organised in close collaboration with youth association Entrée. And the youngest generation of music lovers is invited to the Children’s Concerts and School Concerts in both the Main Hall and Recital Hall; besides these concerts, the orchestra is doing many more educational activities.
Bruckner cycle
The fourth of September 2024 will mark 200 years since Anton Bruckner’s birth. To celebrate, and to share its enormous passion for this timeless music with today’s audiences, the Concertgebouw Orchestra will play his Symphonies 1 through 9 over a year and a half, led by nine renowned conductors. The cycle will begin in December 2023 with the Third Symphony led by honorary guest conductor Iván Fischer. Myung-whun Chung, Klaus Mäkelä and Christian Thielemann will conduct the Seventh, Fifth and Eighth Symphonies respectively. The remaining symphonies will be performed during the 2024-25 season, conducted by Andrew Manze, Daniel Harding, Vladimir Jurowski, Simone Young and Riccardo Chailly.
Partnering with conductors
Artistic partner Klaus Mäkelä will play six programmes with the orchestra this coming season. Besides Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony, he’ll also conduct Beethoven’s Third Symphony ‘Eroica’, the Christmas Matinee featuring music by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, and a festive Annual Gala. Mäkelä will conduct Mahler’s Third Symphony in both Amsterdam and Vienna. This musical city connects Bruckner and Mahler with other composers in its orchestral programmes, including Haydn, Mozart and Arnold Schönberg, the latter born 150 years ago. Schönberg’s stunning Gurre-Lieder will be conducted by conductor emeritus Riccardo Chailly, a century after its Netherlands premiere, in which the composer was also the conductor.
John Eliot Gardiner will return with his Monteverdi Choir for Brahms’s German Requiem. Composer/conductor George Benjamin will return to conduct the Concertgebouw Orchestra for the eighth time, this season with a highly personal programme. With Fabio Luisi the orchestra will take an extensive tour to Japan and South Korea, joined by pianist Yefim Bronfman. Christian Thielemann will lead Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, as well as the three-day Ammodo Conducting Masterclass for up-and-coming young conductors. The orchestra is also pleased to welcome such guest conductors as Marin Alsop, Semyon Bychkov, Myung-whun Chung, Gustavo Gimeno, Joana Mallwitz, Gianandrea Noseda, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Antonio Pappano, Trevor Pinnock and Jaap van Zweden.
Composer in residence Ellen Reid
The American Pulitzer Prize-winner Ellen Reid is next season’s composer in residence with The Concertgebouw and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. One of her projects during her stay in Amsterdam in spring of 2024 will be working with orchestra members on a chamber-music concert. A commissioned work by the Concertgebouw Orchestra will have its world premiere in November 2024. Outside of the residency, Academy participants and orchestra members will also play in the world premiere of Reid’s The Shell Trial during the Opera Forward Festival in March.
Reid’s residency marks an important and welcome trend: in increase in female composers’ names on orchestra programmes world-wide. During the 2023-24 season, the Concertgebouw Orchestra will play works by eleven women. In addition, Concertgebouworkest Young’s performances will include a commissioned work by Carlijn Metselaar.
Composers of today
The Concertgebouw Orchestra has always enjoyed working with eminent living composers, and they are well represented in the 2023-24 season. The orchestra will perform a programme based on the idiosyncratic grand old man of Dutch music, Theo Loevendie: besides his Flexio, the orchestra will play his Six Turkish Folk Poems in an orchestral arrangement by Wilbert Bulsink. The orchestra will give the Netherlands premiere of the commissioned work Latest by the Franco-American Betsy Jolas, and in Sophia Gubaidulina’s Viola Concerto, Antoine Tamestit will make his debut as a guest soloist with the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Soloists
Besides Antoine Tamestit, James Ehnes (in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto) and cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras (in Schumann’s Cello Concerto) will be working with the Concertgebouw Orchestra for the first time. Soprano Lenneke Ruiten will debut in Brahms’ German Requiem and will return a month later for Handel’s Il Delirio Amoroso. Pianists Seong-Jun Cho and Javier Perianes and cellist Alban Gerhardt have all once previously shared the stage with the orchestra. Also returning to the Concertgebouw stage are soprano Chen Reiss, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston, baritones Christian Gerhaher and Matthias Goerne, pianists Emanuel Ax and Igor Levit and violinists Vilde Frang and Frank Peter Zimmermann. The orchestra's principal clarinettist Olivier Patey will be the soloist in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, KV 622.
Major concert halls
There will also be ample opportunity to hear the Concertgebouw Orchestra outside the Concertgebouw. In addition to Opening Night and the tour of Japan and South Korea, they will perform in many of Europe’s most prestigious concert halls, including the Philharmonie de Paris, the Philharmonie in Berlin, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Philharmonie in Cologne and Milan’s Teatro alla Scala. The Concertgebouw Orchestra will also put in its traditional appearances at the Lucerne Festival and the Enescu Festival in Bucharest. Closer to home, the orchestra will perform in Eindhoven and Heerlen, and in the pit of the Dutch National Opera in a new production of Beethoven’s Fidelio.
Developing talent
The Concertgebouw Orchestra considers the development of musical talent essential for ensuring a healthy future for classical music, and it is training new generations of musicians itself. This coming season, the Academy of the Concertgebouw Orchestra will provide a place to twelve talented young musicians, who will participate for a full season with the orchestra, receiving lessons from orchestra members, audition training and workshops and more... Fourteen former Academy students are now members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Concertgebouworkest Young is now in its fourth year. The international youth orchestra, with 85 musicians between 14 and 17 years old from all corners of Europe, is bigger than ever. They’ll present themselves on 23 August at The Concertgebouw and on 25 August at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, under the baton of Andrés Orozco-Estrada. The former members of Young are now active ambassadors for classical music, and many are in professional music training programmes.
Support
The Concertgebouw Orchestra is financed in part by the Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW), the Municipality of Amsterdam, sponsors, funds and many donors world-wide. The majority of its own income is generated through concert revenues both in the Netherlands and abroad.
The Academy of the Concertgebouw Orchestra is made entirely possible by the Concertgebouw Orchestra Foundation, which receives donations for this purpose from (among others) Ammodo, the Dutch Masters Foundation, the Swiss Friends of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Don Quixote Foundation, De Salon, individual donors and a number of registered funds.
Concertgebouworkest Young is possible thanks to the generous support of individual donors, equity funds and corporate partners.
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Living composers in 2023-24
Carlijn Metselaar (1989) – new work (Concertgebouworkest Young: commission, world premiere)
Betsy Jolas (1926) – Latest (ocmmission, Netherlands premiere)
Theo Loevendie (1930) – Flexio and Six Turkish Folk Poems (world premiere of the new version, in Wilbert Bulsink's orchestration with prelude)
Sofia Goebaidoelina (1931) - Viola Concerto
Joan Tower (1938) – Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman
John Adams (1947) – Fearful Symmetries
Arturo Márquez Navarro (1950) – Conga del Fuego Nuevo
George Benjamin (1960) – Concerto for Orchestra (Netherlands premiere)
Unsuk Chin (1961) – Spira (Netherlands premiere)
Kelly-Marie Murphy (1964) – Curiosity, Genius, and the Search for Petula Clark (Netherlands premiere)
Jörg Widmann (1973) – songs from ‘Das heisse Herz’ (Netherlands premiere)
Thomas Larcher (1963) – Symphony No. 2, ‘Kenotaph’
Jessie Montgomery (1981) – Strum
Hawar Tawfiq (1982) – M.C. Escher’s Imagination (commission)
Ellen Reid (1983) – o.a. The Shell Trial
Wilbert Bulsink (1983) – orchestration of and prelude to Theo Loevendie’s Six Turkish Folk Poems (world premiere of the new version)
Samy Moussa (1984) - Symphony No. 2 (Netherlands premiere)