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24/25 marks Weilerstein’s first season as Music Director of the Orchestre National de Lille. To open his tenure, he conducts Mahler’s 5th Symphony and Liszt’s 2nd Piano Concerto with Alexandre Kantorow. He conducts a wide range of repertoire throughout the season, which includes a special programme featuring Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw and Shostakovich’s 13th symphony which will also be performed in the Philharmonie de Paris. In Aalborg, highlights include the start of a 2-year cycle of Brahms symphonies, and a recording of the Strauss horn concertos and a new concerto by Steingrimmur Roloff with Stefan Dohr, Principal Horn of the Berliner Philharmoniker. Elsewhere Weilerstein’s 24/25 engagements include returns to the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington DC), Seattle Symphony, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Spanish National, City of Birmingham Symphony and debuts with the Gürzenich Orchestra (Cologne) and the Staatskapelle Dresden. Soloists with whom he will work this season include Emmanuel Ax, Yo-Yo Ma, Alisa Weilerstein and Midori.
Weilerstein has conducted most of the major orchestras in the world including, in more recent seasons, the Bavarian Radio Symphony, London Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic orchestras, and between 2015-2021 he was Artistic Director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne where he was praised for greatly expanding the orchestra’s repertoire and with whom he made a series of highly regarded recordings.
Born into a musical family, Weilerstein’s formative experience with classical music was as a violinist on tour to Panama and Guatemala with the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra of Boston, where the orchestra performed for thousands of young people who had never heard a live orchestra concert. This experience sparked a desire in Weilerstein to pursue a career in classical music. While pursuing his Master’s degree in violin and conducting at the New England Conservatory, Weilerstein won both the First Prize and the Audience Prize at the Malko Competition for Young Conductors in Copenhagen in 2009 and he was subsequently appointed as Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic from 2012-2015
In 2017, inspired by the brilliant musical evangelism practised by Leonard Bernstein, Weilerstein launched a classical music podcast called “Sticky Notes.” The show, for both music lovers and newcomers alike, has become wildly successful with more than 6 million downloads in 190 countries.
2024/25 season / 472 words. Not to be altered without permission.