Camerata Salzburg

Camerata Salzburg is one of the world’s leading chamber orchestras and is regularly invited to perform at the most important venues, from Paris to Beijing. At home, the chamber orchestra is one of the core ensembles at the Salzburg Festival and the Mozartwoche Festival and has its own subscription cycle in the Great Hall of the Mozarteum Foundation. The core of its repertory is the work of Salzburg’s genius loci Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as well as Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert.

Above all, it is the characteristic ‘Salzburg Mozart sound’ that has made Camerata a cultural ambassador and international figurehead for Mozart’s hometown for years.

In the 2024/25 season, along with appearances at the Salzburg Festival and Mozartwoche Festival, the orchestra has performed at international festivals such as the Gstaad Menuhin Festival, the Rheingau Music Festival, the Festival de Música de Canarias and the Ruhr Piano Festival.

The Camerata enjoys longstanding collaborations with its artistic partners Hélène Grimaud and Janine Jansen. In 2024/25 it also worked with Lisa Batiashvili, Mao Fujita, Richard Galliano, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Dorothee Oberlinger and Fazıl Say.

When Bernhard Paumgartner founded the orchestra in 1952, the artistic credo of each individual member was clear: making music independently with a sense of community, a maxim the orchestra and its members live by today. As its greatest inspirers and most longstanding directors, Bernhard Paumgartner and Sándor Végh shaped the sound of Camerata. After Végh’s death, Roger Norrington had a lasting influence as chief conductor of the orchestra, and he remained its director laureate until his death in July 2025.

Since 2016, the musicians of Camerata have governed their own artistic direction. The orchestra is led by its two concertmasters, Gregory Ahss and Giovanni Guzzo, as firsts among equals. The ensemble has also worked with guest conductors including John Eliot Gardiner, Philippe Herreweghe, Manfred Honeck, François Leleux and Finnegan Downie Dear.

The Camerata is committed to promoting young talent, and regular education programmes take the musicians to perform in kindergartens and schools.

Over the course of more than 70 years, Camerata has made numerous recordings. In 2024 it released a live recording of Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Hélène Grimaud from the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, as well as works by Schumann with Kian Soltani under the direction of Gregory Ahss.