Santa Fe audiences are especially familiar with Alan Gilbert. Not only did he serve as the first music director of the Santa Fe Opera from 2003 to 2006 and the Opera’s assistant concertmaster in 1993, but he made his Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival debut in 2001, as both a conductor and a violist. Less than a decade later, in 2009, Gilbert became one of the most famous figures in classical music when he made history by being the youngest person ever—and the only native New Yorker—to be appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic.
Hailed by The New York Times for his “bold artistic vision,” Gilbert undertook a transformative eight-year tenure in New York. Today, his international career sees him living abroad, where he serves as chief conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra (based in one of the world’s most striking concert halls), music director of the Royal Swedish Opera, and conductor laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. Gilbert built his career by studying at Harvard, Tanglewood, Curtis, and Juilliard and by serving, from 1995 to 1997, as assistant conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra, among other formative positions. Opera occupies a significant spot in Gilbert’s artistic output, and in 2012, he won a Grammy Award for leading The Metropolitan Opera in John Adams’s Doctor Atomic.
Gilbert is a frequent guest conductor with the world’s leading orchestras—from the Berlin Philharmonic and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra to the London Symphony Orchestra and Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra—but he still makes frequent visits to Santa Fe. “It’s impossible not to be inspired. The atmosphere of the city itself, the landscape, the nature…,” Gilbert said in the Festival’s 2023 documentary, Vibrations in the Air. The Festival—where Gilbert served as Artist-in-Residence three times—“is music-making for all the right reasons,” he added. Gilbert’s most recent appearance is Santa Fe was in 2023, when, as a centerpiece of the Festival’s 50th anniversary season, he led more than 40 musicians in Messiaen’s From the Canyons to the Stars . . . a monumental work that evokes the awe-inspiring majesty of the American Southwest.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Gilbert said that “[m]usic is as powerful as ever and can really speak to people today.” Festival audiences can witness that power this season, when Gilbert appears on five programs playing either violin or viola in several major works, including Mendelssohn’s Octet (July 26 & 27); Arensky’s String Quartet in A Minor (July 29, 6 p.m.); Bach’s Goldberg Variations, in a trio arrangement that also features Jennifer Gilbert, concertmaster of the Orchestre National de Lyon (Jennifer and Alan are siblings), and Paul Watkins, cellist of the recently retired Emerson String Quartet (August 1); Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet (August 2 & 3); and Beethoven’s Septet (August 5, 6 p.m.).