André de Ridder occupies a unique position among today’s conductors. His stylistic versatility from Baroque to contemporary music, his projects and collaborations make him much in demand by ensembles such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Nacional de España, Orchestre de Paris and Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. He is artistic director of Musica Nova Helsinki, and in 2018, he received a Royal Philharmonic Society Award for his work as artistic curator of London’s Spitalfields Festival.
With the Southbank Centre, de Ridder has launched a series of genre-defying concerts titled “Unclassified Live” and based on the Radio 3 program. It was co-curated and presented by the program’s producer Elizabeth Alker. The series will resume when the Southbank Centre reopens.
The “live-wire conductor” (The Times of London, 2017) is equally active in the field of opera and music theater, forming close relationships with some of the most prominent opera composers of our time, including Kaija Saariaho, Daníel Bjarnason, Michel van der Aa and also performing repertoire works such as The Magic Flute, Bluebeard’s Castle and Nixon in China. In recent seasons, he has worked with directors such as Kasper Holten, Barrie Kosky, Peter Sellars, Marco Štorman and Enda Walsh, and appeared at houses such as Staatstheater Stuttgart, Finnish National Opera, Dutch National Opera, Irish National Opera and Den Jyske Opera. In a recent season, de Ridder led a multimedia Bluebeard’s Castle with the Philharmonia Orchestra alongside Punchdrunk Theatre Company. He also conducted Gerald Barry’s Alice’s Adventures Underground for Irish National Opera and was reinvited to Staatsoper Stuttgart for two projects.
In 2013, he founded s t a r g a z e, performing projects ranging from Bach to Beethoven to avant-garde electronics and contemporary classical music. The group has gained a significant following and regularly is booked by leading concert halls, including the Barbican Centre London, the Kölner Philharmonie and Philharmonie de Paris, plus Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. In 2020, it presented (Not) Another Beethoven Cycle, a re-examination of all of Beethoven’s symphonies, commissioning a host of artists from a diverse range of disciplines to respond to each symphony.
The group s t a r g a z e records for Transgressive Records. De Ridder’s discography also includes the hugely successful “Four Seasons Recomposed” by Max Richter (DG) and an album of orchestral music by Bryce Dessner and Jonny Greenwood (DG). The Richter recording was awarded a 2013 ECHO Klassik Classic Without Borders Award. De Ridder also acted as producer on the release of “Africa Express Presents: Mali,” on Transgressive Records. This followed a trip to Bamako, Mali, with Damon Albarn and his Africa Express project. In Mali, de Ridder initiated and led a recording of Riley’s In C with local musicians, joined by rock artists including Brian Eno and Damon Albarn.
