The new season!
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. Take a look at our new season.
Concert Series
Want to set yourself up for a stunning season of music in one go? Why not choose one of our concert series? You’ll get
- to choose from the best seats in the hall
- a discount on tickets to single concerts
- priority booking when ordering tickets to a selection of extra concerts
- the season brochure is also available as PDF.
choose one of our concert series
Klaus Mäkelä's concert selection
Bruckner cycle
The fourth of September 2024 will mark 200 years since Anton Bruckner’s birth. To celebrate, the Concertgebouw Orchestra will perform his Symphonies 1 through 9 over a year and a half, led by nine renowned conductors. The Bruckner orchestra par excellence will thus be sharing its enormous passion for these magnificent symphonies with today’s music lovers. Order the cycle as a subscription series now, and you can be there.
about the Bruckner cycle order the Bruckner series
Gurre-Lieder
Arnold Schönberg, who was born 150 years ago in 2024, conducted the Concertgebouw Orchestra in the Dutch premiere of his stunning Gurre-Lieder. A little over a century later, the monumental work will grace the music stands again, this time under the direction of conductor emeritus Riccardo Chailly.
Great conductors, well-loved symphonic works
Artistic partner Klaus Mäkelä will conduct the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 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.
John Eliot Gardiner will return with his Monteverdi Choir for Brahms’ German Requiem. George Benjamin will return to conduct the Concertgebouw Orchestra in a highly personal programme. 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, Joana Mallwitz, Trevor Pinnock and Jaap van Zweden.
Out of the box
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.
Essentials
For those who do not have much experience with symphonic concerts yet, the Concertgebouw Orchestra offers Essentials. Get acquainted with the masterpieces that belong on everyone’s bucket list! The six compact concerts are inventively introduces (in Dutch) by the presenter Thomas Vanderveken. Choose at least three concerts - the more concerts you choose, the bigger your discount.
Extraordinary soloists
Antoine Tamestit (in Gubaidulina’s Viola Concerto), 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. The Concertgebouw Orchestra is happy to welcome the return of 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.
Classical for children
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.
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.
Works by living composers in 2023-24
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.