Dresden Festival Orchestra

Founded in 2012, the Dresden Festival Orchestra is the ensemble for historically informed performance practice at the Dresden Music Festival and is dedicated to exploring the original sound of each work: the core repertoire is from the Romantic era. The members of the orchestra come from such renowned early music formations as the Academy of Ancient Music, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble, the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, the Concentus Musicus Wien, and Il Giardino Armonico. Ivor Bolton has served as Principal Conductor from the start, with Hans-Christoph Rademann, Johannes Klumpp, Josep Caballé Domenech, Constantinos Carydis, and David Robertson as guest conductors. Highlights have included a performance of all of the Schumann symphonies under Daniele Gatti in 2021 and a production of Richard Strauss’s early opera Feuersnot (2015), which was nominated for an International Opera Award. For its concerts, the Dresden Festival Orchestra has engaged such soloists as Giuliano Carmignola, Isabelle Faust, Bejun Mehta, Valer Sabadus, Thomas Zehetmair, Simone Kermes, René Pape, and Martin Helmchen. With Festival Director Jan Vogler as the soloist, the musicians released a recording of Schumann’s Cello Concerto and Second Symphony in 2016. From 2023 to 2026, the orchestra will be joined by Concerto Köln to present Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen under the direction of Kent Nagano in historically informed performances that will first take place at the Dresden Music Festival and then on selected tour stops in Europe.

July 2023