Kammerorchester Basel

The Kammerorchester Basel (“Basel Chamber Orchestra”) has inherited a long tradition of small-ensemble music-making in the Swiss city of Basel, cultivating a twin focus on early music and contemporary music. The orchestra was founded in 1984 by a group of Swiss music students, using the name Serenata Basel. Their intent was to supplant the long-standing Basler Kammerorchester and, like that group, offer programs that mixed early and contemporary repertories. Johannes Schläfli was the orchestra’s first and only conductor; when he departed in 1999, also the year the group took its current name, the orchestra continued with no conductor. The leaders are the concertmasters, currently Julia Schröder, Daniel Bard, and Baptiste Lopez. It performs music up to the Classical period on historically appropriate instruments. The Kammerorchester Basel has, however, featured A-list guest conductors, including Kristjan Järvi, Trevor Pinnock, Christopher Hogwood, and Giovanni Antonini, who led the group in a noted modern-instrument but historically informed cycle of Beethoven's symphonies. The group won an ECHO Klassik Ensemble of the Year award in 2008. The group has recorded for Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Decca, and Sony Classical, among other labels. A notable Kammerorchester Basel recording was a 2011 set of Bach cantatas performed by countertenor Andreas Scholl. The year 2017 saw the release of a Sony album examining Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante in E flat major for violin, viola, and orchestra, K. 364, in the context of other works of the period for similar combinations, and, for DHM, a recording of music from Bologna in the year 1666. Antonini became the orchestra’s principal guest conductor in 2015. Kammerorchester Basel performs at the Olten Stadttheater in Basel; it’s 2018 season included a series of concerts with pianist Katia Buniatishvili. Under Antonini, it began a project to record all of Joseph Haydn’s symphonies together with the orchestra Il Giardino Armonico; the cycle is set to conclude in 2032. In 2022, Kammerorchester Basel planned to launch a project to perform and record a complete cycle of the symphonies of Mendelssohn with conductor Philippe Herreweghe. That year, the orchestra backed soprano Giulia Semenzato on the album Angelica Diabolica on the Alpha label. ~ James Manheim