Alan Gilbert

Born in New York City in 1967, Alan Gilbert comes from a family of musicians: both of his parents played violin with the New York Philharmonic. While still a student at Harvard University, Gilbert was appointed director of the Harvard Bach Society. Additional training took him to the New England Conservatory of Music, the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and the Juilliard School in New York. In 1994, Gilbert won first prize at the Concours de Genève and was also awarded the Georg Solti Prize. He took up his first principal position with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic in 2000, which he led until 2008. During this period, from 2003 to 2006, he was also Music Director of the Santa Fe Opera. For eight years, from 2009 to 2017, Alan Gilbert led the New York Philharmonic as Music Director, becoming the first native New Yorker to hold this position. He increasingly promoted new music there. Since 2019, he has been Chief Conductor of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in Hamburg, and in 2021 he began his tenure as Music Director of the Royal Opera in Stockholm, where he will lead a new production of Berg’s Wozzeck in the 2024-25 season. Alan Gilbert made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York with John Adams’s Doctor Atomic in 2008; in 2015, he conducted the American premiere of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin at Lincoln Center. He has led Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron at the Semperoper Dresden and Korngold’s Die tote Stadt and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess at La Scala in Milan. Gilbert has conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Berliner Philharmoniker, with which he most recently performed Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher in June 2024. He has won two Grammy Awards and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2014. From 2011 to 2018, he taught as Director of Conducting and Orchestral Studies at the Juilliard School.

Lucerne Festival debut in September 2014 leading the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in two concerts.

August 2024