Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

A hall first, then an orchestra

The building came first. The Concertgebouw opened in Amsterdam in 1888 and the orchestra assembled to fill it gave its first concert on 3 November that year under Willem Kes. What Kes started, Willem Mengelberg entrenched: he held the chief conductor's post from 1895 to 1945, half a century, long enough to make the orchestra's sound a matter of habit rather than instruction.

After Mengelberg came Eduard van Beinum from 1945 to 1959, Bernard Haitink from 1963 to 1988, Riccardo Chailly from 1988 to 2004 and Mariss Jansons from 2004 to 2015. That is five men across seventy years, and it is the central fact about the institution: it changes its mind roughly twice a generation. Queen Beatrix added the 'Royal' prefix in 1988, the orchestra's centenary year. In 2008 Gramophone ranked it first among the world's orchestras, a verdict the orchestra has been living with, and occasionally against, ever since.

The Mahler connection, and what is on record

The orchestra has around a thousand recordings behind it and runs its own label, RCO Live. It also plays in the pit for Dutch National Opera, which is why a Bachtrack critic reviewing Jetske Mijnssen's Simon Boccanegra under Fabio Luisi in June 2026 — five stars — was reviewing the same players heard in the main hall a week earlier.

The Mahler thread runs through everything. Mahler conducted the premiere of his Seventh Symphony with this orchestra in 1909, and Alma Mahler later gave it the score. In May 2025 Amsterdam staged its Mahler Festival for only the third time since 1920, and Klaus Mäkelä conducted the Eighth Symphony there on 18 May, the anniversary of Mahler's death, with five choirs and eight soloists and the composer's granddaughter Marina Mahler in the hall. Decca released the live recording digitally worldwide on 7 November 2025, with physical editions in Japan and Korea timed to the orchestra's first Asian tour under Mäkelä that autumn. Mäkelä's comment afterwards was that conducting the Eighth was one of the great moments of his life.

Eight years without a chief

Daniele Gatti became chief conductor in 2016 and was dismissed on 2 August 2018, with immediate effect, after complaints of inappropriate behaviour. The orchestra has had no chief conductor since. That is an unusually long gap for an institution that normally appoints for a decade or more, and it shaped the repertoire: guest conductors, a heavy reliance on returning friends, and a great deal of self-government from the players.

Mäkelä first conducted the orchestra in September 2020 and has come back many times each season since. He was named conductor designate and takes the title of chief conductor in September 2027. He is already chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic, where he started in 2020, and music director of the Orchestre de Paris since 2021; in the same 2027/28 season that he takes Amsterdam, he becomes Zell Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He records exclusively for Decca.

The run-up: Baden-Baden, and a season announced in April

From 2026 the orchestra took over the Berlin Philharmonic's slot at the Osterfestspiele in Baden-Baden, a three-year partnership that puts it in the Festspielhaus every Easter week with Mäkelä. The residency opened on 30 March 2026 with Bach's St Matthew Passion, soloists including Maximilian Schmitt and Matthew Brook, and continued with Mahler's Fifth and Bruckner's Eighth. Writing from the festival, theartsdesk judged the new partnership a success and noted it continues into 2027.

The 2026-27 season was announced on 1 April 2026, with subscriptions opening on 31 March and single tickets on 1 June. Mäkelä takes a large share of it — Berlioz, Mahler and Beethoven among his programmes — alongside Iván Fischer, Riccardo Chailly, Karina Canellakis and Vladimir Jurowski. The soloist list includes Mitsuko Uchida, Janine Jansen, Lisa Batiashvili, Sol Gabetta, Yunchan Lim and Lang Lang. Four new players joined for the season, three of them former members of the orchestra's own Academy, with a double bassist moving up to principal.

The season opened on Friday 11 September 2026 in the open air in Amsterdam's Oosterpark: overtures, showpieces, young players, encores, free to whoever turned up. On 25 September the orchestra's foundation gathered donors for the Leading Women in Music Fund, with the conductor Joana Mallwitz and orchestra musicians talking about how more women reach the podium.

How it is playing in 2026

The reviews from the past season are not uniform, which is the useful part. Chailly's return in March 2026 — Prokofiev's Fourth Symphony, a first for the orchestra, paired with Alexander Nevsky and two Dutch choirs, with Marie-Nicole Lemieux stepping in for Ekaterina Semenchuk — took five stars from Bachtrack across performances on 4, 5, 6 and 8 March.

Rafael Payare's debut on 19 February 2026 did not. Bachtrack called it unconvincing at three stars, though it singled out Frank Peter Zimmermann in Frank Martin's Violin Concerto, on a bill that also held Gubaidulina and Shostakovich's Tenth. In June 2026 Antony Hermus drew four stars for a programme of Dutch premieres and new arrangements of Black American music with the soloist Miro Petkov, described as unlike any other concert the orchestra had given.

The pattern across those three: the orchestra's own playing is rarely what critics argue about. The argument is about who is standing in front of it, which is precisely the question September 2027 answers.

What is actually on sale

The autumn diary is a fair sample of how the orchestra now works. Seong-Jin Cho played Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto under Dima Slobodeniouk on 23 and 24 September 2026, with a late-night 21:00 Entrée Essentials version of the same concerto on 25 September aimed at younger audiences, tickets from €20. On 2 and 4 October the orchestra plays Joe Hisaishi's film music at the Ziggo Dome against Studio Ghibli images, and on 3 October it fills the same arena with Beethoven's Ninth. Emanuel Ax plays John Williams under Petr Popelka on 9 and 11 October, alongside Dvořák's Sixth. Riccardo Minasi conducts Beethoven's Fifth from 22 to 25 October with Mao Fujita in Mozart's Twenty-fifth Concerto.

Then Mäkelä: Mahler's Seventh on 28 and 30 October in the main hall, an Academy jubilee concert on 29 October, and the same Seventh taken on tour from 9 to 19 November — Philharmonie de Paris on the 9th, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg on the 11th, Stadthalle Heidelberg on the 13th, Alte Oper Frankfurt on the 14th, Philharmonie Luxembourg on the 16th and the Musikverein in Vienna on the 19th. One symphony, no soloist, no filler, in the halls where the comparison will be hardest.