Conductor

Music Director Jaap van Zweden conducts Mozart’s timeless Requiem, a work of great poignance and emotional depth. Also on the program is Sofia Gubaidulina’s eerie Viola Concerto featuring soloist Antoine Tamestit. The composer famously said, “The peculiar mysteriousness and veiled quality of the viola’s timbre has always been something of an acoustic enigma to me, and an object of rapture.”

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The Mozart Requiem and Sofia Gubaidulina’s Viola Concerto

Lincoln Center

Music Director Jaap van Zweden conducts the 31st Free Memorial Day Concert presented as a gift to the people of New York City and a day of musical remembrance.

Free Memorial Day Concert

The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine

NY Phil musicians take the solo spotlight in this concert conducted by Music Director Jaap van Zweden. Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante highlights the interplay between violin and viola, and in Brahms’s Double Concerto the violin and cello team up in dialogue with the orchestra. Shostakovich’s skittery nervousness is palpable in the racing rhythms of his concerto for piano and trumpet, performed here by Igor Levit and NY Phil’s own Christopher Martin.

Igor Levit and Stars of the NY Phil

In his final subscription concerts as Music Director, Jaap van Zweden conducts Mahler’s colossal — and profound — Second Symphony. With the forces of a vast orchestra and chorus, two vocal soloists, and offstage brass and percussion, Mahler valiantly explores themes of death and resurrection, tragedy and triumph.

Jaap van Zweden Conducts Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony

Hilary Hahn — the NY Phil’s 2023–24 season Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence — takes center stage in Beethoven’s stately Violin Concerto. Jaap van Zweden concludes the program by conducting Copland’s stirring Third Symphony.

Bravo! Vail: Jaap van Zweden and Hilary Hahn

Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater

Igor Levit (“like no other pianist,” exclaimed The New Yorker) and NY Phil Principal Trumpet Christopher Martin share the spotlight in Shostakovich’s concerto for piano and trumpet. Jaap van Zweden conducts the program, which is bookended by symphonies by Prokofiev and Felix Mendelssohn.

Bravo! Vail: Jaap van Zweden, Igor Levit, and Christopher Martin

Jaap van Zweden and the Orchestra reprise Joel Thompson’s To See the Sky, which they premiered in March. Also on the program: the Prelude to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, full of lyricism and fanfare, and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, in which joy and sorrow seem to be in constant battle.

Bravo! Vail: Jaap van Zweden Conducts Wagner, Joel Thompson, and Brahms

For the tenth time, the Gstaad Conducting Academy participants take centre stage for the grand finale concert. After two weeks of intense work under the exceptional guidance of Jaap van Zweden and Johannes Schlaefli and accompanied by our Gstaad Festival Orchestra, the anniversary edition concludes with a flourish. It’s a special moment for everyone involved, especially as the prestigious Neeme Järvi Prize awaits, an honour that was bestowed just one year after the Academy’s inception for the first time. Over time, it has become a revered accolade, not only drawing interest from up to seven partner orchestras but also annually causing a stir in the professional world with the eagerly anticipated announcement: “And the winners are...”

Gstaad Conducting Academy – Birthday Edition – Concert II

Gstaad Festival Tent

The first grand symphonic concert of the summer with the Gstaad Festival Orchestra, conducted by Jaap van Zweden, is on the horizon. Bruckner’s most impassioned, luminous, and almost joyously exuberant Symphony No. 7 takes the spotlight, often dubbed the “Symphony of Tremolos”. The inaugural movement kicks off in a mysterious “primordial mist”, with violins crafting a long, softly played tremolo. The Adagio is especially notable, serving as a tribute to Richard Wagner. Bruckner had just started working on his Symphony No. 7 when his “blessed, dearly beloved, immortal master”, as Bruckner affectionately referred to Wagner, passed away in Venice in February 1883. In the Adagio, Bruckner introduces the Wagner tuba for the first time in one of his compositions, paired with a quote from Wagner’s Te Deum (“… non confundar in aeternum”: “In eternity, I shall not be confounded.”). Until then, the sombre tones of the Wagner tuba had not ventured beyond Wagner’s orchestra pit. Opening the evening is one of the most remarkable violinists of our era, Janine Jansen, Professor at the Haute école de musique Vaud Valais Fribourg (HEMU) in Sion and the newly appointed Artistic Co-Director of the Sion Festival. The Gstaad Festival Orchestra accompanies her in Mendelssohn’s famous E Minor Concerto.

The Heaven of Bruckner – Trans-cendence VII – Gstaad Festival Orchestra II

With his Seventh, the long-suffering Anton Bruckner finally achieved the breakthrough he had longed for. Although this unique, fundamentally lyrical symphony ends in a wonderful, radiant E major, at its centre is the great C-sharp minor Adagio, in which moving funeral music leads to a grandiose climax and immediately transforms into an achingly sublime epitaph for Richard Wagner, who had recently died. Felix Mendelssohn's immortal Violin Concerto also expresses great emotions, but more compactly. Passion, virtuosity, songfulness and, in the finale, cheerful, capricious fairy sprits make it a standard audience favourite, here performed by Janine Jansen and the Gstaad Festival Orchestra under Jaap van Zweden.

Gstaad Festival Orchestra Jaap Van Zweden

Grafenegg Festival

Experience an exclusive Chicago preview of this program before the CSO appears at the Mahler Festival in Amsterdam as one of only five international orchestras on the lineup. Jaap van Zweden conducts Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, a shadowy, paranormal journey through the mysterious night and into the dawn of a new day.

Mahler 7 with Jaap van Zweden

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Conductor Jaap van Zweden leads the CSO in Mahler’s colossal Sixth Symphony. From the first ominous beat of the strings, the work builds to shocking intensity, full of soaring melodies and towering brass, abruptly contrasted by profoundly sweet interludes. It’s all the drama you need. In time, Mahler’s whole heartfelt world becomes obliterated by cataclysmic hammerblows.

Mahler Symphony No. 6

Cincinnati Music Hall

The CSO brings the soaring emotional peaks and valleys of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony to Chicago audiences before performing it on Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw stage. The “hammer blows of fate” in the finale seem to foreshadow the tragedies in Mahler’s life, including his own fatal illness. But the symphony brims with life’s pleasures, too, from memories of mountain pastures (listen for the cowbells) to a rapturous portrait of the composer’s wife, Alma.

Jaap van Zweden

Conductor

Events

23 - 28 May, 2024

The Mozart Requiem and Sofia Gubaidulina’s Viola Concerto · New York Philharmonic

May 27, 2024

Free Memorial Day Concert · New York Philharmonic

May 30 - Jun 1, 2024

Igor Levit and Stars of the NY Phil · New York Philharmonic

6 - 8 Jun, 2024

Jaap van Zweden Conducts Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony · New York Philharmonic

Jul 17, 2024

Bravo! Vail: Jaap van Zweden and Hilary Hahn · New York Philharmonic

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