Grammy Award-winning conductor Alan Gilbert has been Chief Conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra since fall 2019 and Music Director of the Royal Swedish Opera since spring 2021. In Hamburg, where his contract was extended through the 2028-29 season, his adventurous programming, thought-provoking festivals, and regular online streaming are taking the orchestra to new artistic heights. Gilbert also holds positions as Principal Guest Conductor of Japan’s Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony and Conductor Laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. The first native New Yorker to serve as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, he concluded his transformative eight-year tenure in the post in 2017.

In addition to his appointments, Gilbert maintains a major international presence, making guest appearances with orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, and Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He has conducted operatic productions for the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Zurich Opera, and Santa Fe Opera, where he served as the inaugural Music Director. Beyond Stockholm, key operatic highlights include his staged debut at Milan’s La Scala, where he led a new production of Porgy and Bess before returning to helm the company premiere of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt; his Dresden Semperoper debut with a new production of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron; and his leadership of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra’s U.S. stage premiere of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin as part of the Lincoln Center–New York Philharmonic Opera Initiative.

In his sixth season as Chief Conductor of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Gilbert continues to diversify the ensemble’s programming. They open the season with star-studded accounts of Gurre-Lieder to celebrate the Schoenberg sesquicentennial, their second performance falling exactly 150 years after the composer’s birth. Their other 2024-25 highlights include new and recent works by Alex Paxton, Bernd Richard Deutsch, Dai Fujikura, Magnus Lindberg, and Dalit Warshaw at the second edition of “Elbphilharmonie Visions,” their biennial ten-day celebration of 21st-century music; collaborations with Leif Ove Andsnes, Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, Lawrence Power, Antoine Tamestit, Daniil Trifonov, and Yefim Bronfman, with whom they give a six-city European tour; concert performances of Wozzeck with Matthias Goerne and Christine Goerke at the 2025 Hamburg International Music Festival; the world premiere of a new concerto by Kayhan Kalhor, featuring the composer and cellist Yo-Yo Ma; and symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Tchaikovsky. Beyond Hamburg, 2024-25 sees Gilbert lead productions of The Marriage of Figaro, Die Walküre, and Wozzeck at the Royal Swedish Opera. He also makes his Czech Philharmonic debut and returns to the podiums of the Boston Symphony, Bavarian Radio Symphony, Cleveland, Israel Philharmonic, and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic orchestras.

Last season, Gilbert and the NDR premiered The Elements, a five-part violin concerto by Jake Heggie, Jennifer Higdon, Edgar Meyer, Jessie Montgomery, and Kevin Puts, with NDR Artist-in-Residence Joshua Bell as soloist; launched the 2024 Hamburg International Music Festival; and toured both Europe and Japan. In addition, Gilbert led productions of Elektra and Parsifal as part of the Royal Swedish Opera’s 250th anniversary season; conducted Joan of Arc at the Stake at the Berlin Philharmonic; premiered a new Bernd Franke commission with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; and joined the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony for performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony throughout the Japanese capital. His world premiere recording of Justin Dello Joio’s piano concerto, Oceans Apart, featuring dedicatee Garrick Ohlsson with the Boston Symphony, was released by Bridge Records. Gilbert’s previous NDR highlights include the inaugural edition of “Elbphilharmonie Visions”; a festival devoted to the “Age of Anxiety – An American Journey”; the orchestra’s 75th-anniversary celebrations; extensive Asian and European tours; world premieres of new commissions from Enno Poppe, Marc Neikrug, Lisa Streich, and Composer-in-Residence Unsuk Chin; and ambitious repertoire ranging from Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft and a semi-staged production of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre to symphonies by Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Bernstein, and Bruckner, whose Seventh Symphony they recorded for Sony Classical.

In eight years as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, Gilbert succeeded in transforming the orchestra, already one of the nation’s most venerable arts institutions, into a leader on the current cultural landscape. He initiated the positions of Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence, Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence, and Artist-in-Association. Staged productions of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen, Stravinsky’s Petrushka, and Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake were presented to critical acclaim and capacity audiences, and he oversaw the development of two series devoted to contemporary music: CONTACT!, introduced in 2009, and the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, which was inaugurated in 2014 and returned in 2016 to a fanfare of critical approval. An ardent and longtime champion of Carl Nielsen, Gilbert’s recording of the Danish composer’s Third Symphony, made with the New York Philharmonic for their four-album box set as part of “The Nielsen Project” on Denmark’s Dacapo label, was chosen as Gramophone’s favorite recorded version of the work. Summarizing his achievement, the New Yorker observed, “Gilbert has made an indelible mark on the orchestra’s history and that of the city itself.”

From 2011 to 2018, Alan Gilbert served as Director of Conducting and Orchestral Studies at the Juilliard School, where he was also the first holder of Juilliard’s William Schuman Chair in Musical Studies. He made his acclaimed Metropolitan Opera debut in 2008, leading a production of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic that, when released on DVD, went on to win a Grammy Award. He also conducts on Renée Fleming’s Grammy-winning Decca release, Poèmes, and was nominated for the 2015 and 2016 Emmy Awards for Outstanding Music Direction in PBS’s Live from Lincoln Center broadcasts of two New York Philharmonic productions: the orchestra’s celebrated staging of Sweeney Todd, and its 100th-birthday gala tribute to Frank Sinatra, which featured Christina Aguilera, Bernadette Peters, and Sting. Gilbert received Honorary Doctor of Music degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music (2010) and Westminster Choir College (2016), as well as Columbia University’s Ditson Conductor’s Award, which recognizes his “exceptional commitment to the performance of works by American composers and to contemporary music” (2011). Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2014, he was also named an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He gave the 2015 lecture for London’s Royal Philharmonic Society during the New York Philharmonic’s European tour, speaking on “Orchestras in the 21st Century – a new paradigm,” and received a 2015 Foreign Policy Association Medal for his commitment to cultural diplomacy. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Gilbert hosted a popular series of Facebook Live chats with fellow conductors Marin Alsop, Herbert Blomstedt, Karina Canellakis, Daniel Harding, Sir Antonio Pappano, Sir Simon Rattle, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. He was appointed as Royal Court Kapellmeister by the King of Sweden in 2022.