Introducing The SWR Sinfonieorchester

The 2010/2011 season—the farewell season for Sylvain Cambreling, the orchestra's principal conductor of many years—included programmatic highlights that combined Beethoven and Schönberg or Haydn, Varèse and Mahler, and culminated in a guest performance of Olivier Messiaen's opera Saint François d'Assise in Madrid's Teatro Real. A new concert series for children incorporated orchestral music with literature written specifically for the music and commissioned by the orchestra. And the world premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas's limited approximations, a work for orchestra and six pianos tuned at twelfth-tone intervals, garnered international attention.

Ever since the Donaueschingen Festival was reestablished in 1950, it has has been inextricably linked with the SWR Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg. The orchestra has premiered approximately 400 compositions at the festival and it has made music history: with the works of Hans Werner Henze and Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Olivier Messiaen, Helmut Lachenmann and Wolfgang Rihm. To this day, the orchestra is an indispensable partner for the composers of our era, both in Donaueschingen and beyond.

But the SWR orchestra earns its position "in the centre of European culture", as Sylvain Cambreling has expressed it, not only with regard to contemporary music. Since its establishment in 1946, it attracts in equal measure internationally acclaimed conductors and soloists as well as musical ambassadors, both nationally and internationally, from Salzburg to Lucerne, Hamburg to Madrid, Berlin to New York. Over 600 works, spanning three centuries, have been recorded by the SWR Symphony Orchestra.

The driving force behind these many activities have been, and continue to be, its distinguished principal conductors from Hans Rosbaud, Ernest Bour and Michael Gielen to Sylvain Cambreling and François-Xavier Roth, who, since September 2011, has been at the helm of the SWR orchestra—an orchestra that for six decades has embraced special challenges, and, in so doing, has won a rarely achieved degree of flexibility and mastery, both musical and conceptual.

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