Every year, the Menuhin Festival Gstaad thrills its audience with unique concerts and top-class musical programs set amidst magnificent countryside. The Gstaad Festival Orchestra (GFO) grew out of the vision to spread the innovative, inspiring spirit of the Menuhin Festival and to enable this celebrated music festival to resonate internationally.
Since its foundation in 2010, the GFO has enjoyed new success season after season and worked with the conductors Kristjan Järvi and Neeme Järvi, alternating annually. Among the soloists to have performed with the orchestra are Renée Fleming, Martin Grubinger, Renaud Capuçon, Truls Mørk and Sol Gabetta.
The GFO has already performed with great success at the La Chaise Dieu Festival, in Saint-Denis, at the Herrenchiemsee Festival and the Merano Festival. In the next few seasons, the orchestra will also appear at for instance the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Festival, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Philharmonie in Cologne and the Liederhalle in Stuttgart.
The Gstaad Festival Orchestra is made up of the best musicians from Switzerland's leading orchestras, and thus constitutes a high-calibre musical “national team”. The aim is to bring together the high-quality sound and famous musical spirit of the top Swiss orchestras, to create a process of dialogue between the musicians, and to forge a dynamic, unique-sounding orchestra every year.
For the 2013/14 season, the outstanding cosmopolitan conductor Kristjan Järvi was appointed principal conductor of the orchestra. With his diverse musical imagination and never-failing curiosity, he is the incarnation of the modern Menuhin Festival and a stroke of luck for the GFO’s future development.