A Living Tradition: Gewandhausorchester Leipzig in Hong Kong

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As early as 1479, Leipzig’s City Council employed municipal musicians – the Kunstpfeifer, or “artistic pipers” – embedding professional music in the city’s civic and religious life. The orchestra as we know it took shape in 1743, when a society of Leipzig citizens founded the “Das Große Concert”. In the mid-18th century, orchestral life still revolved largely around courts and churches, supported by aristocratic and ecclesiastical patronage rather than ticket-buying audiences. 

Leipzig took a different path. Its orchestra was sustained not by a court but by a prosperous trading city – merchants, scholars and an increasingly confident middle class who regarded concerts as part of civic life. In 1781 the performances moved to a hall in the city’s textile trading house – the Gewandhaus (Gewand means “garment or robe”) – and the orchestra gradually became known simply as the Gewandhausorchester.

When the orchestra was founded in 1743, Joseph Haydn was 11 years old. Mozart had yet to be born. The symphony was only beginning to outgrow its functional origins in court, church and theatre. The Gewandhausorchester grew alongside that transformation. It did not inherit a fixed canon of masterpieces but itself played a key role in shaping the very repertoire that came to define the modern concert hall.

That rich history is written directly into the programmes the orchestra brings to the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall on 2 and 3 June 2026. Under its Music Director Andris Nelsons, the Gewandhausorchester opens its first concert with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat. English-speaking audiences know it as the “Emperor” Concerto, a nickname coined by the work’s London publisher and never used by Beethoven himself – an irony, given the composer’s well-documented disillusionment with Napoleon. Whatever the title, it stands as one of the defining statements of the early 19th century, expanding the concerto’s scale and reimagining the balance between soloist and orchestra.

It was the Gewandhausorchester that gave the “Emperor” its first public performance in 1811, with the young pianist Friedrich Schneider as soloist. Unlike his earlier four piano concertos, Beethoven himself did not appear in that role. His hearing had deteriorated so severely that public performance was no longer possible, bringing to a close his career as a piano virtuoso. 

The second half of the programme brings the story further into focus with Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 in B-flat, the “Spring” Symphony. In 1841, the Gewandhausorchester gave the work its world premiere under Felix Mendelssohn, then Music Director of the orchestra.

Mendelssohn’s tenure in Leipzig was pivotal. Appointed in 1835 at just 26, he raised the orchestra’s standards and, through his meticulous rehearsal methods, helped shape the evolution of modern conducting practice.

His friendship with Robert Schumann proved equally significant. By the early 1840s, Schumann was already known as a pianist, a composer of piano cycles and Lieder, and an influential music critic. Encouraged by his wife Clara Schumann to expand his ambitions, he turned to orchestral writing in 1841. Mendelssohn’s support – and the platform of the Gewandhaus – gave his First Symphony a public launch of real authority.

The second concert on 3 June widens the lens. Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor remains one of the most popular works in the repertoire, its melodies recognised far beyond the concert hall. Composed after a period of depression and creative paralysis, it marks a turning point in the composer’s life. Its sweeping climaxes and lyrical passages carry both vulnerability and resilience.
 

Yulianna Avdeeva’s affinity for Russian repertoire gives her natural authority in Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto, one of the most beloved works in the piano repertoire. With its tolling opening chords that unfold into melodies of sweeping lyricism, the concerto marked the return of Rachmaninov’s creative voice after years of silence. Its emotional directness continues to draw audiences in.

The programme then turns to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in E minor, completed in 1953 in the uneasy aftermath of Stalin’s death – a vast, searching work that moves from brooding tension to a hard-won assertion of the composer’s identity. 

Here, the Nelsons factor comes fully into view. As Gewandhauskapellmeister, Andris Nelsons stands in a lineage that took modern shape under Mendelssohn and runs through figures such as Artur Nikisch and Kurt Masur. He has recorded an award-winning Shostakovich cycle with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, lending particular authority to this performance.

Across two evenings, these four landmark works chart the evolution of the concerto and symphony from Beethoven’s expansion of form, through Schumann’s romantic imagination, to Rachmaninov’s lyric breadth and Shostakovich’s 20th-century reckoning. The Gewandhausorchester played a direct role in launching some of these works; in others, it has helped sustain and reinterpret them within a tradition that began in Leipzig and expanded far beyond it. The orchestra that once premiered Beethoven now brings the same discipline and architectural clarity to the vast canvases of Shostakovich.

In June, Hong Kong becomes part of that long, ongoing story.

—Thomas May