Nicholas Collon appointed Principal Guest Conductor at Gürzenich-Orchester

Nicholas Collon has just been announced as Principal Guest Conductor of the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne (Music Director François-Xavier Roth) for an initial three years, from 2017/18. He will conduct two programmes each season at the Cologne Philharmonie and also appear with the orchestra at Cologne Opera.

Collon first conducted the orchestra a year ago, in a programme of Britten, Ravel and Vaughan Williams, when he struck up an instant and electrifying rapport with the musicians. Their next concerts together are in February 2018, when he brings an eclectic programme of Debussy, Bartók, Wagner, Ligeti and Ravel, and conducts Don Giovanni at Cologne Opera. Then at Easter he returns to conduct movements from Haydn’s Seven Last Words paired with James Macmillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross, both interleaved with J.S. Bach cantatas sung by counter-tenor Bejun Mehta.

Collon will also bring his Aurora Orchestra to the Cologne Philharmonie in October 2017, when the orchestra will play Beethoven’s Symphony No.6 from memory.

Guest highlights this spring have included:

- Prokofiev Symphony No.5 and works by Thomas Adès with the Finnish Radio Symphony (immediate return offered 2019)
- A searing performance of Shostakovich Symphony No.8 with the BBC Philharmonic at Bridgewater Hall (listen here)
- Stravinsky Firebird with the Residentie Orkest The Hague (where he is Principal Conductor) at Rotterdam De Doelen

Next month he conducts Schubert Symphony No.8 and Sibelius Symphony No.7 with the City of Birmingham Symphony, before taking the Aurora Orchestra to the BBC Proms for a televised Beethoven’s 'Eroica' (from memory), which they also tour to the Berlioz Festival at La Côte-Saint-André and to the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.