Alan Gilbert Finishes Summer 2025 Season with Weeklong residency at La Jolla SummerFest and Tour of Norther European Festivals with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra
During Gilbert’s eight-year tenure as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, he appointed pianist Inon Barnatan as the orchestra’s inaugural Artist-in-Association. The two remain close musical associates and look forward to reuniting in California when Gilbert returns to La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest, where Barnatan is now in his seventh season as Music Director.
As a gifted violinist and dedicated chamber musician, Gilbert opens the residency on violin, joining a stellar artistic lineup for a series of chamber performances. After Mendelssohn’s Octet (July 30), Nielsen’s String Quintet (Aug 1), and Mozart’s G-minor Piano Quartet (Aug 2), the series culminates with Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, featuring Barnatan on piano, as when Gilbert performed the piece at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. This prompted a five-star review from Bachtrack, which observed: “Gilbert has the capacity with some repertoire to ascend into ethereal realms. For him, this quartet supplied such an opportunity.”
At La Jolla, Messiaen’s quartet shares a program with another great masterwork of the 1940s. To conclude his residency, Gilbert leads the SummerFest Chamber Orchestra in James Ledger’s chamber ensemble arrangement of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, with Renée Fleming as soloist (Aug 5). The conductor’s many previous collaborations with the superstar soprano include her Grammy-winning Decca release Poèmes, on which he “provides accompaniment as languorous and misty as her singing” (San Francisco Classical Voice).
The present season marks Gilbert’s sixth as Chief Conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra (NDREO). In August, he and the orchestra embark on a North European festival tour, with dates at Germany’s Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival (Aug 23), Sweden’s Stockholm Baltic Sea Festival (Aug 28), and Austria’s Grafenegg Festival (Aug 30), which was established to showcase “the leading conductors of our time.” Gilbert’s NDREO tour program opens with Restless Oceans by Grammy-nominated British composer Anna Clyne and Bruch’s First Violin Concerto, featuring Opus Klassik award-winning Spanish violinist María Dueñas. It closes with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in the familiar Ravel orchestration, of which Gilbert’s interpretation has been called “majestic, crackling and full of character” (The New York Times).