Skip to content
BSO, Pops, Tanglewood, and Symphony Hall Logos
Conductor

Andris Nelsons

Ray and Maria Stata Music Director, endowed in perpetuity, Boston Symphony Orchestra

Andris Nelsons headshot

About

The 2022-2023 season is Andris Nelsons’ ninth as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Ray and Maria Stata Music Director. The fifteenth music director in the BSO’s history, Andris Nelsons made his debut with the orchestra at Carnegie Hall in March 2011, his Tanglewood debut in July 2012, and his Symphony Hall debut in January 2013.

He has led the orchestra on three European tours and one of Japan. In the 2022-2023 season, Mr. Nelsons and the BSO embark on another major Japanese tour, including three concerts at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall. Mr. Nelsons and the orchestra give annual performances at Carnegie Hall, where they are joined this season by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and cellist Gautier Capuçon, and where last season they performed a new BSO-commissioned violin concerto by Unsuk Chin with Leonidas Kavakos as well as Alban Berg’s complete opera Wozzeck. He led eleven programs during the 2022 Tanglewood season, including a concert performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Brahms’s A German Requiem, all five Beethoven piano concertos with soloist Paul Lewis, and world and American premieres by Caroline Shaw, Elizabeth Ogonek, Helen Grime, and Fazil Say. Mr. Nelsons’ expansive BSO repertoire in 2022-2023 ranges from Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Strauss, and Stravinsky to commissioned works by Thomas Adès, Julia Adolphe, Thierry Escaich, Steven Mackey, Carlos Simon, and Julia Wolfe.

Andris Nelsons and the BSO’s ongoing series of recordings of the complete Shostakovich symphonies for Deutsche Grammophon, so far encompassing eleven of the fifteen symphonies, has earned three Grammy Awards for Best Orchestral Performance and one for Best Engineered Album. The latest installment, featuring symphonies nos. 1, 14, and 15 and the Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a, was released in June 2021. Future releases will explore the composer’s concertos for piano, violin, and cello, and his monumental opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

Mr. Nelsons is also Gewandhauskapellmeister of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig (GHO) and has brought the orchestras together in a unique artistic alliance including a concert series at Boston’s Symphony Hall in November 2019 and a seven-CD set for Deutsche Grammophon featuring both orchestras in the major orchestral works of Richard Strauss, released in May 2022. Under exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon, he has recorded the complete Beethoven symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic and is recording the Bruckner symphonies with the GHO. Mr. Nelsons works with such orchestras as the Berlin Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and appears with such opera companies as the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the Bayreuth Festival. Born in Riga in 1978 into a family of musicians, Andris Nelsons began his career as a trumpeter in the Latvian National Opera Orchestra before studying conducting. He was Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Principal Conductor of Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie in Herford, Germany, and Music Director of the Latvian National Opera.

See More