The Gürzenich Orchestra, firmly rooted in Cologne but open to the world, stands for groundbreaking interpretations, innovative programmes and diverse offerings beyond the concert hall. It is one of Germany’s leading orchestras in both concert and opera – and has a tradition that has written music history like no other.

The orchestra was founded in 1827 by the Concert-Gesellschaft Köln, but its prehistory can be traced back to the medieval cultivation of music in Cologne. It has been the orchestra of the City of Cologne since 1888 and delights more than 100,000 visitors in about 50 concerts per season in the Cologne Philharmonic Hall. It also performs as the Cologne Opera Orchestra in around 160 performances each season.

Honorary conductors are Günter Wand (1946–1974) and Dmitrij Kitajenko. The designated Gürzenich Kapellmeister and General Music Director of the City of Cologne from 2025/26 is Andrés Orozco-Estrada.

The Gürzenich Orchestra looks back with pride on its great past: outstanding works of the Romantic repertoire by Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler were premiered with the Gürzenich Orchestra. Today, this heritage is an incentive for the orchestra and its conductors to build bridges to the music of the present day: here, too, it can point to an impressive list of important premieres.

Around 150 musicians of the highest international calibre put their heart and soul into making the orchestra to what it is: an orchestra of the highest calibre and with unlimited expressive possibilities. But it also leaves the classical concert hall full of joy and without fear of contact to creatively inspire people in the midst of society. This is also part of its self-image. With performances in senior citizens’ homes and kindergartens, workshops, concerts for schoolchildren and offers such as the Family Card, the orchestra inspires the most diverse target groups for music. Initiatives such as the Cologne Civic Orchestra and the Cologne Civic Choir invite people to actively participate. The orchestra is also active in the digital space with its GO Plus livestreams as well as podcasts and videos. Multiple award-winning CDs make it possible for the world to experience the orchestra’s uniqueness as cultural ambassadors of the city of Cologne.

Dmitri Kitayenko is one of the great maestros of our time. For decades now he has regularly conducted prestigious orchestras across Europe, America and Asia.

Born in 1940 in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), Dmitri Kitayenko studied at the famous Glinka School of Music and the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory, before leaving to study with Leo Ginzburg in Moscow as well as Hans Swarowsky and Karl Österreicher in Vienna.

In 1969, he was a prizewinner at the first International Herbert von Karajan Conducting Competition, and at the age of twenty-nine he was appointed Principal Conductor of the Stanislavsky Theatre in Moscow. In 1976, he assumed the post of Principal Conductor of the Moscow Philharmonic.

In 1990, Dmitri Kitayenko moved to the West, successively becoming Principal Conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Symphony Orchestra of Bern/Switzerland and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as Principal Guest Conductor of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. From 1999 until 2004, he was Chief Conductor of the KBS Symphony in Seoul. From 2012 to 2017, Dmitri Kitayenko has also been Principal Guest Conductor of Berlin’s Konzerthausorchester. In September 2015, he was named Conductor of Honor by the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra.

Dmitri Kitayenko and the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne, of which he has been Honorary Conductor since 2009, have recorded the complete symphonies by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. These recordings have been awarded with numerous international prizes and are considered important reference recordings. Their recording of Tchaikovsky’s opera Iolanta in 2015 (with Olesya Golovneva, Alexander Vinogradov and Andrei Bondarenko in the lead roles) caused a sensation, and it received the Opera of the Year Award of the International Classical Music Awards (ICMA).

In 2018, OehmsClassics released Stravinsky’s Symphony Op. 1 and his Suites Nos. 1 & 2 as well as Glazunov’s Seasons and Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings with the Zagreb Philharmonic. The Second Symphony by Jean Sibelius, recorded with the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne received the ICMA Award 2019 as best recording in the category Symphonic Music.

Dmitri Kitayenko’s discography encompasses a total of more than 250 recordings, mostly with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.

In recognition of his life’s work and outstanding recordings, including the complete symphonic works by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Scriabin and Tchaikovsky, Dmitri Kitayenko received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the ICMA (International Classical Music Awards) in 2015.

The son of a conductor at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Anatol Liadov was trained at the Conservatory, where he was briefly a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov and later a member of the teaching staff. He was associated with Balakirev and subsequently became a member of Belyayev’s circle, helping, in particular, in the establishment of the publishing house that Belyayev set up for Russian composers. He was a thoroughly competent musician, conductor and composer but did not apply himself consistently to work. His failure to supply music for a Diaghilev ballet in Paris in 1910 allowed Stravinsky his first chance with the Ballets Russes. His compositions are characteristic of this period in Russian music, when nationalism was joined with technical competence inculcated at the conservatories.

Orchestral Music

The best-known orchestral compositions by Liadov are the descriptive Russian fairytale pieces Kikimora, Baba-Yaga and Volshebnoye ozero (‘The Enchanted Lake’). His last orchestral work was the symphonic poem Skorbnaya pesn’ (‘Threnody’). All are very much in the nationalist tradition exemplified by Rimsky-Korsakov.

Piano Music

Liadov wrote a number of shorter piano pieces, including fugues and a set of canons, testimony to his contrapuntal ability. Other pieces have characteristic titles, examples of pleasing and well-crafted compositions for which there was a ready market.

Vocal and Choral Music

Liadov wrote a setting of the final scene of Schiller’s Die Braut von Messina (‘The Bride from Messina’) for his Conservatory graduation. Of some 26 songs, 18 are children’s songs.

Mussorgsky was one of the five Russian nationalist composers roughly grouped under the influence of the unreliable Balakirev. Initially an army officer and later, intermittently, a civil servant, Mussorgsky left much unfinished at his death in 1881. Nevertheless, his influence on composers such as Janáček was considerable, not least in the association he found between speech intonations and rhythms and melody.

Rimsky-Korsakov, a musician who had acquired a more conventional technique of orchestration and composition, revised and completed a number of Mussorgsky’s works, versions which now may seem inferior to the innovative original compositions as Mussorgsky conceived them.

Operas

The greatest of Mussorgsky’s creations was the opera Boris Godunov, based on Pushkin and Karamazin, with a thoroughly Russian historical subject. He completed the first version in 1869 and a second version in the 1870s, but it was Rimsky-Korsakov’s version that was first performed outside Russia. The opera provides an important part for a bass in the role of Boris. Other operas by Mussorgsky include Khovanshchina, completed and orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov. A later version by Shostakovich restores more of the original text. The opera Sorochintsy Fair, after Gogol, completed by Lyadov and others, includes the orchestral favourite A Night on the Bare Mountain—an orchestral witches’ sabbath.

Piano Music

Mussorgsky’s 1874 suite Pictures at an Exhibition, a tribute to the versatile artist Hartman, has proved the most popular of all the composer’s works, both in its original version for piano and in colourful orchestral versions, of which Maurice Ravel’s has proved the most generally acceptable. Linked by ‘Promenades’ for the visitor to the exhibition, Mussorgsky represents in music a varied collection, from the ‘Market of Limoges’ and the ‘Catacombs’ to the final ‘Great Gate of Kiev’—a monumental translation into music of an architectural design for a triumphal gateway.

Vocal Music

Mussorgsky wrote a number of choral works and songs, many of the latter of considerable interest, including the group The Nursery. ‘The Song of the Flea’, based on Goethe’s Mephistophelean song in Faust, is a bass favourite.

One of The Five, the leading group of 19th-century Russian nationalist composers, Rimsky-Korsakov embarked at first on a career as a naval officer, following the traditions of his family, but he later resigned from the service to devote himself entirely to music. He was proficient as an orchestrator and set himself to smoothing out some of the apparent crudities in the work of some of his fellow composers, completing and revising works such as Borodin’s opera Prince Igor and much of the seemingly uneven writing of Mussorgsky. He was respected as a teacher, his pupils including the young Stravinsky. Most generally known for his orchestral compositions, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote songs and choral music, chamber music and works for piano. His textbook on orchestration has been widely if not always wisely used.

Operas

Of the 15 operas completed by Rimsky-Korsakov, mention may be made of The Snow Maiden, The Maid of Pskov, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Mlada, Sadko, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the satirical and once-banned Le Coq d’or (‘The Golden Cockerel’). Orchestral and instrumental excerpts from some of these may be very familiar, including the famous ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ from The Tale of Tsar Saltan depicting a prince who turns himself into a bee and stings his wicked aunts.

Orchestral Music

Of the various orchestral works of Rimsky-Korsakov, Capriccio espagnol (‘Spanish Caprice’) and Sheherazade are by far the best known, followed by the Russian Easter Festival overture. The title of the Capriccio espagnol is self-explanatory; Sheherazade, with no detailed and specific programme, is based on the tales told in The Arabian Nights by the princess Sheherazade (represented by a solo violin) in her effort to postpone the sentence of death declared on her by her master, the Caliph.