Riccardo Chailly

Riccardo Chailly, born in Milan in 1953 into a musical family (his father Luciano was a composer and administrator at La Scala), is one of the most distinguished conductors of his generation, and a figure of special importance to this orchestra. He was chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from 1988 to 2004, a sixteen-year tenure during which he broadened its repertoire, championed twentieth-century and contemporary music alongside the Bruckner and Mahler for which the orchestra is famous, and made many celebrated recordings with it. Since leaving Amsterdam he has led the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (2005 to 2016), La Scala in Milan (from 2015) and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra (from 2016). Italian warmth, rhythmic vitality and a keen ear for orchestral colour are hallmarks of his music-making. His return to the Concertgebouw to conduct the Prokofiev he knows so well is, in effect, a reunion with one of his own great orchestras.