Don't miss the opportunity to hear Riccardo Chailly conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra! On February 7, they'll be performing astonishingly beautiful works by Bruckner at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Get your tickets now!

Riccardo Chailly conducts the Concertgebouw Orchestra

Riccardo Chailly, conductor emeritus and former chief conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, rounds off the symphonic cycle marking Anton Bruckner’s 200th birthday with his enigmatic "swansong," the Symphony No. 9 - including the finale, which the latest scholarship has deemed complete.

Bruckner's final symphony, a farewell to life

Anton Bruckner’s symphonies are a pillar of the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s core repertoire. And they’re certainly in good hands with such an authority as Riccardo Chailly. He sees Bruckner as "a saint who constantly confronted the devil, a man of such piety that he dared to explore the darkness." 

In the ninth, darkness wins: Bruckner died before completing the work. The slow third movement is a dignified "farewell to life", as Bruckner himself noted in the score. "It has to be the most beautiful thing I have ever written," he said of this moving Adagio. "It always grips me when I play it."

Many fragments of the missing finale were found among Bruckner’s personal effects. And for more than a century, these made up a fascinating puzzle, yet no one could piece them together to form a convincing whole. But a team of musicologists changed all that in 2012.

The performance version by Samale, Phillips, Cohrs and Mazzuca is astounding and changes the symphony’s tragic character: after three dark movements, the last brings redemption. Performed here is the SPCM version heard in J.A. Phillips’s most recent revision dating from 2021–22. 

Concert programme

The concert programme consists of:

• Bruckner - Symphony no. 9

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra was founded in 1888. Its distinctive sound has made it one of the world’s leading orchestras. 

The orchestra is famous for its renditions of works by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Anton Bruckner, and for its long-standing concert traditions such as the St Matthew Passion in the week before Easter and the Christmas Matinee. It has always worked closely with contemporary composers.

The Concertgebouw Orchestra has had just seven chief conductors to date. The eighth was announced in June 2022: Klaus Mäkelä joined as artistic partner in 2022-23 season and will become chief conductor in 2027. The coming season sees five extraordinary programmes with Klaus Mäkelä at the helm. 

Buy your tickets

Buy your tickets in advance on the Concertgebouw website and get to experience one of the top orchestras in the Netherlands playing in the acoustical wonder that is the Concertgebouw. Plus, drinks are included in the ticket price - book your tickets today!