Herbert Blomstedt

Recently turned 96, Herbert Blomstedt is not only the longest-serving of the top stars on the podium: his noble, unassuming, and modest character also make him an exceptional personality. Great faithfulness to the score, natural authority, and soulfulness define his work, which is inseparably linked to his religious and human ethos. Blomstedt, who was born in 1927 in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Swedish parents, received his musical training at the Royal Conservatory in Stockholm, at Uppsala University, and at New York’s Juilliard School of Music. He subsequently trained with Igor Markevitch in Salzburg and with Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood. In 1954, he made his debut on the podium of the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and later served as Principal Conductor of such important Scandinavian ensembles as the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra and the Danish and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestras. For ten years, he also headed the Dresden Staatskapelle. In 1985 Herbert Blomstedt was elected Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony; from 1996 to 1998 he served as head of the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, and from 1998 to 2005 he led the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, which subsequently named him Honorary Conductor. Blomstedt works as a guest conductor with the leading orchestras of Europe and North America. In the 2022-23 season, for example, he conducted the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, the New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco and Chicago Symphony Orchestras. He is an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music and holds multiple honorary doctorates. Blomstedt received the Léonie Sonning Music Prize in 2016. On his 90th birthday in 2017, a volume of conversations with him was published under the title Mission Musik.

Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut on 24 August 1979 conducting the Staatskapelle Dresden in a program of works by Respighi and Bruckner.

July 2023