Alan Gilbert

Born in New York City in 1967, Alan Gilbert comes from a musical family: both 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. Further training took him to the New England Conservatory of Music, the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and the Juilliard School in New York. In 1994 Alan Gilbert won First Prize at the Concours de Genève and was also awarded the Georg Solti Prize. He took up his first position as Principal Conductor in 2000 with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, which he presided over until 2008. During this time, from 2003 to 2006, he also served as Music Director of Santa Fe Opera. For eight years, from 2009 to 2017, Alan Gilbert led the New York Philharmonic as Music Director — he was the first native New Yorker to hold this position. He particularly promoted new music there. He has been Chief Conductor of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in Hamburg since the 2019-20 season and has been Music Director of the Royal Opera in Stockholm since 2021. In the opera realm, Alan Gilbert made his debut with John Adams’s Doctor Atomic at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2008; in 2015 he conducted the American premiere of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin at Lincoln Center. He has appeared at the Semperoper Dresden with Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron and at La Scala in Milan with Korngold’s Die tote Stadt and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Gilbert has conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Berlin Philharmonic, with which he performed works by Webern, Unsuk Chin, and Brahms/Schoenberg in 2021. A two-time Grammy Award winner, he has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2014. He is Director of Conducting and Orchestral Studies at the Juilliard School.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL on 7 and 8 September 2014, when he led the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in a pair of concerts, conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Mahler’s Third.

June 2022