All stories

The Concertgebouw Orchestra on tour

In addition to its performances at its home base in Amsterdam, the Concertgebouw, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra makes regular appearances in some of the best and most prestigious concert halls in the world, with multiple concerts and tours outside the Netherlands scheduled each season. This month three familiar cities and one debut!
Concertgebouw Orchestra at the Philharmonie de Paris image: Charles Dherouville
Concertgebouw Orchestra at the Philharmonie de Paris image: Charles Dherouville

From 19 to 22 February, the Concertgebouw Orchestra will be travelling with conductor Paavo Järvi and violinist Lisa Batiashvili to Vienna, Frankfurt, Paris and Lyon. The orchestra has made frequent appearances in these first three cities, but its visit to Lyon is a first: never before has the orchestra performed there. The programme includes the Beethoven Violin Concerto and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5.

In Vienna, the Concertgebouw Orchestra has, since its inception, usually appeared at the Musikverein, but since 1980 has increasingly performed at the over 100-year-old Konzerthaus as well. It has given seventeen performances at Frankfurt am Main’s historic opera house, the Alte Oper, with which it has enjoyed particularly close ties since 2006.

The Concertgebouw Orchestra has given some eighty performances in Paris. All of these since 2015 have been at the Philharmonie, the prestigious concert hall which opened its doors that same year. Recently, its ties with the Philharmonie were further bolstered: at the end of last year, a long-term collaboration was announced between this venue, the Orchestre de Paris which is resident there, the Concertgebouw and the Concertgebouw Orchestra.

This month’s tour concludes in Lyon, where the orchestra has never performed in its nearly 135-year existence. The Maurice Ravel Auditorium was built in the 1970s for the Orchestre National de Lyon in the brutalist style common at the time. Inaugurated in 1975, the hall was initially deemed unsuitable for symphonic concerts, a situation since remedied by renovation and digital technology. The hall is now the vibrant cultural centre of Part-Dieu, the third arrondissement of France’s third-largest city.