Jaap van Zweden

Amsterdam-born Jaap van Zweden has risen rapidly in little more than a decade to become one of today’s most sought-after conductors. He has been Music Director of the Dallas Sym-phony Orchestra since 2008, and in September 2012 he took up the position of Music Direc-tor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. Appointed at nineteen as the youngest con-certmaster ever of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, he began his conducting career in 1995 and held the positions of Chief Conductor of many major Dutch orchestras. In Novem-ber 2011 van Zweden was named as the recipient of Musical America's Conductor of the Year Award 2012 in recognition of his critically acclaimed work as Music Director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and as a guest conductor with the most prestigious US orche-stras. Jaap van Zweden has appeared as guest conductor with many leading orchestras across the globe, including the Chicago Symphony, Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, the Munich Philharmonic, WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, Orchestre National de France, Oslo Phi-lharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and London Philhar-monic Orchestra. Aside from an extensive symphonic repertoire, opera also plays an impor-tant part in Maestro van Zweden’s career, and he has conducted La Traviata and Fidelio with the National Reisopera, Madama Butterfly at the Netherlands Opera, and concert performan-ces of Verdi’s Otello, Barber’s Vanessa and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, Parsifal and Lo-hengrin at the Concertgebouw with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. Recent highlights have included highly acclaimed debuts with the Vienna Philharmonic, To-nhalle-Orchester Zurich, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Boston, San Francisco and London Symphonies, and his BBC Proms debut conducting the Netherlands Radio Phi-lharmonic in Bruckner’s Eighth symphony. Future highlights include subscription debuts with the Deutsches Sinfonieorchester Berlin and Budapest Festival Orchestra and return visits to the Orchestre de Paris and the Rotterdam and London Philharmonic Orchestras. He will curate with the Chicago Symphony a three-week festival entitled "Truth to Power" that will focus on music of Britten, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, tour China with the Hong Kong Phi-lharmonic, and return to the Verbier Festival.