Teodor Currentzis opens the series of Guest Orchestras with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, which he leads for the first time. The Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, founded in 1986/87 by Claudio Abbado, has been open to young musicians from all European countries since 1992 and is considered a talent academy for European orchestra musicians. Since 1988 the orchestra has appeared in concert regularly at the Salzburg Festival; in 2022 it will participate in a staged opera production for the first time: also under Teodor Currentzis’ baton, it performs the double bill of Carl Orff’s oratorio-opera De temporum fine comoedia and Béla Bartók’s one-act Bluebeard’s Castle. The Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester completes its residency in Salzburg with another orchestra concert, this one led by Herbert Blomstedt.

Teodor Currentzis also brings his orchestra musicAeterna to Salzburg for a concert; the unusual programme constellation combines Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14 with a concert rendition of Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas. Vocalists include Kate Lindsay, Nuria Rial, Nadezhda Pavlova, Matthias Goerne and the musicAeterna Choir, which is also involved in the Orff-Bartók double bill.

Apart from concerts by the regular guests West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim with Lang Lang as soloist, as well as the Berlin Philharmonic under its chief conductor Kirill Petrenko, there will once again be two performances by the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna on the programme, one with Joel Sandelson, the winner of the Herbert von Karajan Young Conductors Award chosen in the summer of 2021. The chairman of the jury for the Young Conductors Award is Manfred Honeck, who concludes the series of Guest Orchestras with his Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Anne-Sophie Mutter as the soloist.