Biography
“Nelsons set out the through lines of the evening: exuberance, urgency, brisk yet elastic tempi, rhythmic drive, contrapuntal clarity … The orchestra responded with complete commitment, playing with fire and precision throughout the evening”
Bachtrack reviewing the first concert in the BSO’s Beethoven & Romanticism festival, January 2025
Meticulous preparation, galvanising leadership and performances that flow straight from the heart are all central to the art of Andris Nelsons. The Latvian conductor is Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Gewandhauskapellmeister of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. The two contracts were simultaneously renewed in October 2020: currently celebrating his 11th season with the BSO, Nelsons will stay at the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig until at least the end of the 2026‑27 season.
His association with the latter orchestra began with an acclaimed debut concert in 2011 and continued to develop thereafter with regular guest-conducting dates, leading to his appointment as the 21st Gewandhauskapellmeister in February 2018. During the festival that marked both the orchestra’s 275th anniversary and his own official inauguration, Nelsons conducted eleven concerts, combining core repertoire with three world premieres and giving audiences a taste of the energy and musical diversity he has since continued to bring to the role.
In addition to critical praise and audience ovations, one of the strongest measures of Nelsons’ success is the speed with which he is able to forge close and productive relationships with experienced orchestral musicians. He established an immediate rapport with the Boston Symphony Orchestra when they first worked together in March 2011, an affinity which strengthened over the following two seasons with performances at the Tanglewood Festival and Boston’s Symphony Hall. Appointed as the BSO’s 15th Music Director, Nelsons launched his tenure at the beginning of the 2014–15 season.
His appointment as Gewandhauskapellmeister heralded the partnership between the Leipzig and Boston orchestras known as the BSO/GHO Alliance. This has encompassed co-commissions and educational initiatives as well as shared and complementary programming. This season’s BSO European tour culminates in Leipzig, where Nelsons will lead his two orchestras in a Shostakovich Festival, marking the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death. The concerts will include a performance of Symphony No. 7 given by the joint forces of both ensembles.
In May 2016, the conductor signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon, paving the way for landmark projects with both the BSO and the Gewandhausorchester.
Nelsons and the BSO have recently concluded their acclaimed decade-long Shostakovich project, the first three volumes of which were all honoured with Grammy® Awards. In addition to presenting all 15 symphonies, several pieces of incidental music, the Festive Overture and the Chamber Symphony, the project has been expanded to encompass the composer’s complete piano, violin and cello concertos (with soloists Yuja Wang, Baiba Skride and Yo-Yo Ma), and the first recording in more than two decades of his only full-length opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District. Marking the end of the project and the 50th anniversary of Shostakovich’s death, as well as Nelsons’ 10th anniversary with the BSO, DG is issuing the complete Shostakovich recordings digitally and as a 19-CD set on 28 March 2025. The Violin Concertos will be released as a digital album on the same date, the Cello Concertos and Piano Concertos in all formats on 25 April and 2 May respectively.
A second large-scale project has seen Nelsons record the symphonies of Anton Bruckner with the Gewandhausorchester. The series, each of whose recordings juxtaposes Bruckner’s music with an excerpt from a Wagner opera, was launched to critical acclaim in 2017 with the release of Symphony No. 3, coupled with the Overture to Tannhäuser. The second album pairs Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 with the Lohengrin Prelude; the third features Symphony No. 7 and Siegfried’s Funeral March from Götterdämmerung; the fourth, a double album, comprises Bruckner’s Sixth and Ninth Symphonies together with the Siegfried Idyll and Prelude to Parsifal; and the fifth, another double album, presents the Second and Eighth Symphonies with the Prelude to Act One from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The sixth and final double album couples Symphonies Nos. 1 and 5 with the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and was issued in February 2022. The complete Bruckner/Wagner recordings were released digitally and as a 10-CD box set in October 2023.
For Deutsche Grammophon’s Beethoven 2020 celebrations Nelsons joined forces with the Wiener Philharmoniker to record the composer’s complete symphonies. Presented on five CDs and a single Blu‑ray Audio disc, the new cycle was released in October 2019, with Symphony No. 9 released as a standalone album two months later.
Nelsons also paid tribute to the composer Sofia Gubaidulina on the occasion of her 90th birthday. He conducted the Gewandhausorchester in the world premiere recordings of three of Gubaidulina’s works: Dialog: Ich und Du (with soloist Vadim Repin), The Wrath of God and The Light of the End. The album was released in October 2021.
As part of a 2022 focus on the music of Richard Strauss, Nelsons recorded a 7-CD set of the composer’s orchestral works with the BSO and the Gewandhausorchester, as well as soloists Yuja Wang and Yo-Yo Ma. In addition to recording three albums each, the orchestras came together for a joint performance of the Festliches Präludium. This hugely ambitious project was released in May 2022 and became the first Strauss orchestral cycle available in Dolby Atmos.
Nelsons has recently made recordings with some of the world’s leading pianists – and fellow DG artists. In 2023, he and the Gewandhausorchester set down two orchestral works with Lang Lang and his wife Gina Alice. Released in March 2024, Lang Lang – Saint-Saëns featured their readings of Carnival of the Animals and the French composer’s Second Piano Concerto.
In April 2024, Yuja Wang joined Nelsons and the BSO at Symphony Hall to perform Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie. The concert was recorded live and issued as a digital album in December 2024, with a physical version to follow in July 2025. The Financial Times praised Nelsons for a “cogently paced” performance, in which Yuja shone “alongside a never-better Boston Symphony Orchestra”.
Nelsons and the BSO have also recently worked with Seong-Jin Cho, performing and recording Ravel’s two piano concertos. Their album came out in February 2025 and will also be part of the deluxe edition of Cho’s complete Ravel piano music, set for release on 2 May 2025. “Performing with the BSO, you feel like the French spirit is in their blood,” said Cho. “It was so inspiring to play and record with them, and of course working with Andris is always a real joy.”
The conductor’s forthcoming engagements have a major focus on Shostakovich and include concerts with the BSO at home in Boston and at Carnegie Hall (April 2025) as well as on the BSO’s European tour, which takes in Vienna, Riga and Prague before concluding at the Leipzig Shostakovich Festival. The latter runs from 15 May to 1 June and will offer a comprehensive examination of the composer’s music. Nelsons will conduct, among other works, a complete symphony cycle, shared between the Gewandhausorchester, the specially formed Festival Orchestra of young musicians and, as mentioned, the BSO in No. 7. He then gives three concerts, featuring works by Berlioz, Debussy and Wagner, with the Münchner Philharmoniker in Munich and Heidelberg (13–15 June).
Andris Nelsons was born into a musical family in Riga in November 1978. He studied piano during his childhood and later made swift progress as a trumpeter, performing with the Latvian National Opera Orchestra as a teenager and developing a player’s understanding of the orchestral profession. His early conducting experience was shaped under the supervision of Mariss Jansons, who became his teacher and guide. Nelsons made his conducting debut with the Latvian National Opera at the age of 21 and became the company’s music director two years later. News of the young conductor’s visionary performances of German and Slavic repertoire in Latvia and as Principal Conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie reached the UK and led to his appointment as Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (2008–15). Nelsons’ years at the helm of the CBSO established him as the sought-after conductor he is today, and his services to music in the UK were recognised with the award of an honorary OBE, presented to him at the Royal Festival Hall in October 2018.
3/2025