Dresden Festival Orchestra

Founded in 2012, the Dresden Festival Orchestra is the ensemble for historically informed performance at the Dresden Music Festival. Its core repertoire lies in the Romantic era. The orchestra’s members come from such renowned early music formations as the Academy of Ancient Music, the Orchestra of the 18th Century, the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble, the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, the Concentus Musicus Wien, and Il Giardino Armonico. Ivor Bolton has served as Chief Conductor from the start, with Hans-Christoph Rademann, Johannes Klumpp, Josep Caballé Domenech, Constantinos Carydis, and David Robertson as guest conductors. Highlights have included performances 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 the International Opera Award. 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 for its concerts. A recording of Schumann’s Cello Concerto with Festival Director Jan Vogler as the soloist and of the Second Symphony was released in 2016. In 2023, the orchestra joined forces with Concerto Köln under the direction of Kent Nagano to take on Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, which is being performed in an historically informed version. After Das Rheingold in 2023, Die Walküre is on the program this year; Siegfried and Götterdämmerungwill follow in 2025 and 2026, respectively, first at the Dresden Music Festival and then on selected tour stops in Europe. 

One previous Lucerne Festival appearance: on 22 August 2023, when the Dresden Festival Orchestra made its debut here in Wagner’s Das Rheingold.

Juli 2024