Andris Nelsons

Born in Riga in 1978, Andris Nelsons grew up in a family of musicians and began his career as a trumpeter at the Latvian National Opera. During this time he also continued training as a conductor, studying with Alexander Titov in St. Petersburg and taking private lessons with Mariss Jansons. Nelsons was appointed Chief Conductor of the Latvian National Opera in 2003 and went on to helm the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from 2008 to June 2015. He has served as Music Director with the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 2014 and has also held the position of Gewandhauskapellmeister in Leipzig since 2018. Nelsons is a regular guest conductor with many leading international orchestras and at major opera houses. He has appeared at the Vienna, Munich, and Berlin Staatsoper companies, the Metropolitan Opera in New York; the Royal Opera House in London; and the Bayreuth Festival; in 2023 he conducted Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Salzburg Easter Festival. Nelsons performs regularly with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras, having conducted the latter’s New Year’s Concert in 2020 as well as their Schönbrunn Summer Night Concert in 2022. Lucerne Festival honored him in 2012 by naming him “artiste étoile” and entrusted him with several Lucerne Festival Orchestra concerts in 2014-15. The Shostakovich cycle on which Nelsons is working with the Boston Symphony Orchestra has already won four Grammy Awards. He is currently recording a Bruckner cycle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, five installments of which have already been released; he made recordings of all nine Beethoven symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic in the anniversary year of 2020. A box set of the symphonic works of Richard Strauss, which was a joint project with his two orchestras in Boston and Leipzig, was also published in 2022. Andris Nelsons was awarded the International Shostakovich Prize in 2019.

Lucerne Festival debut on 31 August 2009 with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in works by Britten, Berlioz, Debussy, and Ravel.

July 2023