Jaap van Zweden

Jaap van Zweden, born in Amsterdam in 1960, is one of the most prominent conductors of his generation, and a musician with a special bond to this orchestra. A violin prodigy, he won the Oskar Back Competition at fifteen, studied at Juilliard with Dorothy DeLay, and in 1979, at just nineteen, became the youngest-ever concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Encouraged toward conducting by Leonard Bernstein, he built a major podium career, leading the Dallas Symphony, the Hong Kong Philharmonic and, from 2018 to 2024, the New York Philharmonic as its music director. Known for the precision, intensity and disciplined energy of his music-making, van Zweden returns here to the orchestra in whose ranks he spent his formative years, bringing an insider’s knowledge of its sound to a wide-ranging programme.