At Mahler Festival, CSO and Jaap van Zweden are praised as a class apart

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under guest conductor Jaap van Zweden, kicked off the CSO’s 2025 European Tour with two concerts May 14-15 in Amsterdam at the historic Royal Concertgebouw, as part of that venue’s Mahler Festival 2025, running May 8-18. 

For this prestigious international event, the CSO was the only orchestra from the Americas to be invited to perform alongside titans such as the Berlin Philharmonic and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, with the latter led by Klaus Mäkelä, its chief conductor designate (who’s also the music director designate of the CSO).

The 2025 event falls 105 years after the first Mahler Festival in 1920, organized by Willem Mengelberg to mark his 25th anniversary as chief conductor of the Royal 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 Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the second Mahler Festival was presented. “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). 

On May 14, the CSO and van Zweden performed Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, which received universal praise from the Dutch press. "From the first bar, it is clear with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on stage, we are in a different, higher league than [previous performances] at this year’s Mahler Festival," wrote Rahul Gandolahage in Amsterdam’s NRC newspaper. “Under van Zweden, the march-like beginning is of course military-tight, but also full, warm, layered, energetic, lively. That sound lingers throughout the symphony.”

After Amsterdam, the CSO moves on to Germany, for concerts in Hamburg (May 17-18) and Dresden (May 19); Prague (May 20) in the Czech Republic, and Poland, Wrocław (May 22-23), returning May 24 to Chicago.