Mariss Jansons was chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from 2004 to 2015. After his departure, the orchestra named him conductor emeritus.
Born in Latvia, Jansons studied violin and conducting in St. Petersburg and continued his studies with Hans Swarowsky in Vienna and Herbert von Karajan in Salzburg. In 1973, Mariss Jansons was appointed Yevgeny Mravinsky’s assistant with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra.
From 1979 to 2000, he served as music director of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, bringing it great international acclaim. He was music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra from 1997 to 2004 and music director of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra from 2003 until his death on 1 December 2019.
Jansons has made numerous appearances throughout the world as a guest conductor of the Berlin, the Vienna and the London Philharmonic Orchestras, as well as the leading orchestras in the United States.
With Jansons at the helm, the Concertgebouw Orchestra was named the world’s greatest orchestra in music magazine Gramophone in 2008. After his farewell as chief-conductor in 2015, Jansons returned to the Concertgebouw Orchestra in the next year to conduct Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame at Dutch National Opera, and Mahler´s Symphony No. 7 a few months later. His final concert with the Concertgebouw Orchestra was in October 2017, when he conducted works by Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky and Liszt.