MAHLER unFINISHED

This SWR Symphonieorchester has its artistic home in the Liederhalle Stuttgart and the Konzerthaus Freiburg. Formed in September 2016 from the merger of the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR and the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, its artistic profile includes interpretative approaches from historically informed performance practice, the classical-romantic core repertoire and contemporary music in equal measure. Teodor Currentzis has been Chief Conductor of the SWR Symphonieorchester since the 2018/2019 season; François-Xavier Roth will take over this position in the 2025/2026 season.

Annual fixtures in the SWR Symphonieorchester’s concert calendar include SWR’s own concert series in Stuttgart, Freiburg and Mannheim as well as performances at the Donaueschingen Music Festival and the Schwetzingen SWR Festival. Since 2020, the SWR Symphonieorchester has been the resident orchestra of the Baden-Baden Whitsun Festival. Invitations regularly take the orchestra to the Salzburg Festival, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Dortmund, Essen, Vienna, Edinburgh, London, Barcelona, Madrid and Warsaw.

Internationally sought-after conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Peter Eötvös, Christoph Eschenbach, Sir Roger Norrington, Jakub Hrůša, Eliahu Inbal, Ingo Metzmacher, Kent Nagano, Michael Sanderling, Pablo Heras-Casado, Jonathan Nott, Dima Slobodeniouk and David Zinman have worked with the SWR Symphonieorchester . Among the top-class soloists are Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Antoine Tamestit, Gil Shaham, Nicolas Altstaedt, Vadym Kholodenko and Martin Grubinger as artists in residence, as well as many other renowned guests, including Hilary Hahn, Sabine Meyer, Julia Fischer, Yulianna Avdeeva, Renaud Capuçon, Anna Vinnitskaya, Janine Jansen, Mischa Maisky, Vilde Frang and Fazil Say.

With its extensive music education programme, SWR Symphonieorchester reaches around 15,000 children, young people and adults in the SWR broadcasting area every year. Numerous live broadcasts and concert recordings for SWR2 and the web portal SWRClassic.de enable many music lovers all over the world to take part in the concerts of the SWR Symphonieorchester.

Teodor Currentzis is principal conductor of the SWR Symphonieorchester, founder and artistic director of the orchestra and choir musicAeterna. For the Greek-born Currentzis, Russia became his adopted home since the early 1990s, when he began his conducting studies at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory with Ilya Musin. From 2004 to 2010, Currentzis was chief conductor of the Novosibirsk Opera House and Ballet; from 2011 to 2019, he served as artistic director of the Perm Opera and Ballet. Since 2012, Teodor Currentzis has curated the Diaghilev Festival in Perm.

As principal conductor of the SWR Symphonieorchester, Teodor Currentzis focuses primarily on the symphonic œuvre of Gustav Mahler and Russian symphonic music, but also frequently on contemporary compositions, including works by Lachenmann, Schnittke, Crumb, Scelsi, Zender, Kourliandski and Nikodijevic.

With the SWR Symphonieorchester and musicAeterna, Teodor Currentzis regularly embarks on extensive guest tours with concerts at the Berlin Philharmonie, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, Milan's La Scala and the Auditorio Nacional de Música in Madrid. He is also a welcome guest at the Salzburg Festival, the Ruhrtriennale, the Lucerne Festival, the Klara Festival in Brussels and the Festival in Aix-en-Provence.

Teodor Currentzis also collaborates with the most famous theatre directors, including Robert Wilson, Romeo Castellucci and Peter Sellars. Many of his CDs released by Sony Classical have won international awards. The web portal SWRClassic.de features numerous concert recordings made by Teodor Currentzis together with the SWR Symphonieorchester. In addition to symphonies by Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich, the site also features high-quality studio productions made under pandemic conditions, such as Hans Zender’s Schuberts Winterreise and Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.