Jaap van Zweden - Music Director and Conductor

Conductor Jaap van Zweden began his tenure as music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in September 2008. He is also music director of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Kamer Filharmonie (2005-2013).

Through the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Jaap van Zweden has been introduced to American audiences. While well-known to European, Australian and Asian audiences, the only other American orchestra in addition to Dallas which he has guest conducted prior to his music directorship with the DSO was with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra (1996). Most recently, van Zweden led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in critically acclaimed performances of Bruckner's Fifth Symphony (2008).

Having joined the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra as concertmaster at age 19, he spent the next sixteen years being inspired and mentored by Solti, Haitink, Giulini, Harnoncourt and Bernstein. As a matter of fact in 1990, it was Bernstein who asked him to take over a Mahler Symphony No. 1 rehearsal, while Bernstein listened from the hall. Bernstein's pronouncement was that he was a born conductor and should pursue it. With this encouragement, the Juilliard-trained violinist began studying conducting in the Netherlands and performed as violinist and conductor with several orchestras between 1994-1997.

In 1997, Jaap van Zweden made his decision to conduct full time, played his last concert as a violinist with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra performing the Shostakovich 1st Violin Concerto, and was named the chief conductor of the Netherlands Symphony Orchestra where he remained until 2003. In 2000, he added the music directorship of the Residentie Orchestra of The Hague to his credits, a post he held until 2005.
Since 2001, he has guested with, and been re-invited to, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, London Philharmonic and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestras, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France, Orchestre National du Capital de Toulouse, Munich Philharmonic, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Danish Radio Orchestra, Bern (Switzerland) Philharmonic, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, Hong Kong Philharmonic and Tokyo Philharmonic, among others.

Apart from an extensive symphonic repertoire, opera also plays an important part in Jaap van Zweden's career. During recent seasons, he has conducted La Traviata and Fidelio with the Nationale Reisopera in Holland and Samuel Barber's Vanessa in a concert performance at the Concertgebouw with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. In the 2006-07 season he made his debut with the Netherlands Opera conducting Madama Butterfly, and future projects with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic include concert performances of Lohengrin and Tristan and Isolde.

A prolific recording artist, Jaap van Zweden has recorded all of the Beethoven symphonies with the Residentie Orchestra of The Hague for Philips, and is in the process of recording for Octavia all of the Bruckner symphonies with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, of which numbers 4, 7 and 9 have been completed.

Born in 1960 in the Netherlands, Jaap van Zweden began his violin studies at the Amsterdam Conservatory before entering The Juilliard School in New York at age 16, as a student of Dorothy DeLay, and supported his way through school by winning various violin competitions. He was married in 1983, and he and his wife Aaltje have four children ages 23 to 13.
The van Zwedens are very committed to bringing awareness and acceptance to the cause of autism, and in the Netherlands have established the Papageno Foundation devoted to bringing music therapy into the homes of autistic children.