Biography after Etesiane Orchestra
The young Belgian conductor Gabriel Hollander, already “well-regarded” (MusiCultura), praised as a “magician of the text” (La Libre) and with “wide and attentive gesture” (Le Soir), recently was invited as the only conductor mentee for the 2023 Peter Eötvös mentoring program. His musical presence in the classical music scene is emerging on an international level, and his work has been acclaimed and appreciated by the press on numerous occasions.
Gabriel’s career as a conductor and musical leader continues with musical projects throughout the current and the next seasons. In the 2022-2023 season, he continues to serve as the musical director of the Bruocsella Symphony Orchestra, and highlights of his guest conducting positions are his repeated invitations with the Ars Musica contemporary music festival, with the STYX ensemble, and the Midsummer Mozartiades festival, where he’ll conduct the Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Wallonie in a staged production of Mozart’s Zauberflöte. This season also means Gabriel’s debut with the Belgian-based youth orchestra Melomania and the foundation of the new Etesiane Orchestra.
Being passionate about different musical genres, Gabriel’s repertoire goes from the baroque period to contemporary music and musical creations, in the domain of symphonic orchestras, choral repertoire and operas. Also, Gabriel’s love for imagining and creating things from scratch, made him create three full operas in the summer of 2022 — the “Scratch Operas“, leading three different teams simultaneously of over a hundred people.
As a firm believer in the power of continued challenges, Gabriel recently participated to several international competition, where his work was clearly noticed and appreciated (semi-finalist of the International Opera Conductor Competition in Liège (Belgium), the Ionel Perlea International Conducting Competition in Romania, finalist of the Fellowship competition of the Royal Northern College of Music). Also he has received many invitations to high-standard international masterclasses (amongst others by Peter Eötvös in Budapest and at the Royal Northern College of Music).
His conducting debut was in 2014 in a Mozart piano concerto, with Severin von Eckardstein as soloist. Since then, he has worked with numerous a variety of orchestras and choirs, among others the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège, Opéra de Wallonie, the Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Wallonie, the Szolnok Symphony Orchestra (Hungary), members of the Bucharest National Opera (Romania), the Berlin Sinfonietta (Germany), the Pazardzhik Symphonic Orchestra (Bulgaria), the Michigan University Students Orchestra (USA), the Orion Orchestra in Aberystwyth (Wales), the Orchestra Cupiditas (Italy), the Choir and Orchestra of the Minimes Cantat (Brussels), the Carloo Cantores choir (Belgium) and the A Chantar choir (Belgium).