Jaap van Zweden will relinquish his post as music director of the New York Philharmonic at the end of the 2023-24 season.
The 60-year-old Dutch conductor said “that the upheaval of the pandemic had prompted him to reconsider his relationship with the orchestra, which he has led since 2018, as well as with his family, which he rarely got to see during his globe-trotting days before the Covid crisis,” The New York Times’ Javier C. Hernández reports.
“It is not out of frustration, it’s not out of anger, it’s not out of a difficult situation,” Van Zweden told Hernández. “It’s just out of freedom.”
Van Zweden joins several other internationally prominent conductors recently announcing seemingly early departures from orchestras. Simon Rattle, music director of the London Symphony Orchestra since 2017, will leave that post and assume artistic direction of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra of Munich in 2023. (Rattle’s wife, the Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, and their children live in Germany. Rattle has applied for German citizenship.) Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the Lithuanian music director of Britain’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra since 2016, will be leaving at the end of this season.
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