The CSO to perform at prestigious 2025 Mahler Festival in Amsterdam

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is one of five internationally acclaimed ensembles invited to participate in the third-ever Mahler Festival, running May 9-18, 2025, at the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Jaap van Zweden, who just completed a guest-conducting engagement with the CSO at Symphony Center, will lead the Orchestra at the festival.

The 10-day festival will feature all 10 of Mahler’s symphonies, as well as his songs scored for vocalist and piano. Also participating are the Berlin Philharmonic, led by Kirill Petrenko, its principal conductor, and by Daniel Barenboim, former CSO music director; NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo with chief conductor Fabio Luisi; Budapest Festival Orchestra under music director Iván Fischer, and the Royal Concertgebouw, led by Klaus Mäkelä, that orchestra’s chief conductor designate.

The festival begins with the Concertgebouw in Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, and later in the event, in his Symphony No. 8 (Symphony of a Thousand). The CSO will perform the composer’s Symphonies Nos. 6 and 7. The NHK Symphony Orchestra will present the Third and Fourth symphonies. Concluding the festival, the Berlin Philharmonic will offer Mahler’s unfinished Symphony No. 10, conducted by Barenboim. In addition, pianist Julius Drake and young vocalists will perform the composer’s complete song repertoire.

The 2025 event comes 105 years after the first Mahler Festival, organized by Willem Mengelberg to celebrate his 25th anniversary as chief conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, but also to honor his friend and idol, Gustav Mahler, whom he regarded as “the Beethoven of his time.” In 1995, when van Zweden was concertmaster of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the second Mahler Festival occurred.

“Mahler led a life full of contradictions: the roller-coaster he experienced in his family life, his divergent feelings about human existence,” said van Zweden. “It’s all in his music.” 

Amsterdam has long been central to Mahler’s legacy. At Mengelberg’s invitation, Mahler led the Concertgebouw in his own works four times before his death in 1911. “Just as Bayreuth has become the model and the standard for all performances of Wagner’s works, Amsterdam has been made the spiritual center of Mahler’s art,” said composer Rudolf Mengelberg, longtime artistic director of the Concertgebouw (and a distant cousin to Willem). 

At Mahler’s death, neither The Song of the Earth nor his Tenth Symphony had been performed in public. “In fact, the existence of sketches of this last symphony was hardly known. It’s a wonderful piece that I’ve often had the pleasure of conducting,” Barenboim said. “Today, it’s as important to the development of music as when it was first composed and performed. The Tenth is and remains music of the future.”

Festival passes become available on Nov. 14, with single tickets going on sale June 1, 2024. More information is available here.