Following the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the Tonhalle Society Zurich over the past two seasons, which also featured numerous world premières and staged performances, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich will begin a new chapter of the orchestra’s history as of the 2019/20 season together with Chief Conductor and Music Director Paavo Järvi. David Zinman directed the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich until the 2013/14 season and is now its Conductor Laureate; Lionel Bringuier was Chief Conductor until the 2017/18 season. A successful tour of Asia with Paavo Järvi in the autumn of 2018 was followed by live recordings for the first CD, with orchestral works by Olivier Messiaen. Recordings of all the Tchaikovsky symphonies are planned for the 2019/20 season, complementing the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich’s more than 40 CD productions. These include complete recordings of all the Beethoven, Mahler, Brahms and Schubert symphonies, as well as Ravel and anniversary box sets.
Consisting of just over 100 musicians from 20 nations, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich performs 50 different programmes at more than 100 concerts every season. These are supplemented by guest appearances in more than 70 cities in 16 countries to date. The orchestra’s principal players can be heard in the TOZ Soloists series. Both at home and on tour, the ensemble performs with renowned soloists such as Janine Jansen, Martin Grubinger, Joshua Bell, Rudolf Buchbinder, Julia Fischer, Gautier Capuçon, Yuja Wang, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Lisa Batiashvili and Sabine Meyer.
The orchestra maintains close links with guest conductors such as Franz Welser-Möst, Bernard Haitink, Herbert Blomstedt, Manfred Honeck, Krzysztof Urbański, Jakub Hrůša, Kent Nagano, Giovanni Antonini and Jan Willem de Vriend.
The orchestra has played at the Tonhalle Maag since the beginning of the 2017/18 season. The 2019/20 season will be the last of three during which the ensemble has performed in Zurich’s 5th District before it moves back to the renovated Tonhalle concert hall on the shores of Lake Zurich.
