Andris Nelsons

Andris Nelsons, born in Riga in 1978 into a family of musicians, trained first as a trumpeter (he played in the Latvian National Opera orchestra before he ever conducted one), and that grounding in the practical life of an orchestra has marked his music-making ever since. He rose through posts in Herford and Birmingham (where he succeeded a line of celebrated chief conductors at the City of Birmingham Symphony) before taking the two positions he holds today: Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 2014 (he is due to step down after the summer of 2027), and Gewandhauskapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester since 2018, an unusual transatlantic double that he has used to forge a formal alliance between the two ensembles. His recordings include a complete, Grammy-winning Shostakovich survey with Boston and a Beethoven symphony cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic.

That instinct for lineage shapes tonight’s programme. Nelsons frames Mozart’s ‘Linz’ Symphony, the work in which Mozart first opened a symphony with a slow introduction, a gesture learned from Haydn, against Dvořák’s Sixth, a symphony written in open homage to Brahms’s Second in the same radiant D major. Two acts of creative debt, a generation apart: the afternoon traces how a tradition is passed forward, from Vienna outward to Bohemia and back to the Musikverein.