Thomas Dausgaard to take over at BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
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Version 0 of 1. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra today announces their new Chief Conductor: the Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard will take over from Donald Runnicles in September 2016. This is good news. Dausgaard’s inventive programming, his committed, passionate and convincing advocacy of new music (listen to his recordings of his fellow Dane Per Nørgård with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra) and his imagination in rethinking the core repertoire make him an exciting fit for the BBCSSO. He is currently Chief Conductor of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, with honorary positions at the Orchestra della Toscana and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, where he was principal conductor from 2004–2011. “The infectious joy of making music with the BBCSSO makes it a great honour and pleasure to become its Chief Conductor”, said the 51-year-old conductor. “I am a fond admirer of the orchestra’s creativity, team-spirit and excellence, and I look forward very much to exploring all the exciting possibilities which lie ahead of us.” Runnicles’s exemplary championing of the late-romantic repertoire that he knows and loves so intimately has deepened the SSO’s expressive possibilities, as recent Proms seasons have revealed to a national audience. Runnicles will continue with the orchestra he has led since 2009 as their Conductor Emeritus, and in terms of a team of associated creative and conductorial presences, the BBCSSO now has one of the most dazzling rosters of maestros of any orchestra in the country: Dausgaard and Runnicles, Ilan Volkov (another former chief) as their Principal Guest Conductor, with his innovative Tectonics Festivals of new music, composer-conductor Matthias Pintscher as their Artist-in-Association, and Jerzy Maksymiuk as their Conductor Laureate. You’ll be able to make up your own mind about Dausgaard’s music-making in the 2015-16 season with the BBCSSO when he conducts the last three symphonies of Sibelius and Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. A potential signal of the adventure that awaits the orchestra comes from his agent’s website, which reveals that Dausgaard’s interests extend well beyond music to far-flung fields of anthropology and cultural history, with his “fascination with the life and culture of remote communities: he has visited head-hunting tribes in Borneo, volunteered as a farmer in China and stayed with villagers on an island in the South Pacific”. |