New festival in Het Concertgebouw: Mind the Gap!

Festival Mind the Gap! is Het Concertgebouw's new festival that in June 2026 opens up the classical canon to underrepresented Black composers from Europe, the Americas and Africa. The programme brings concerts in the Grote Zaal with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Chineke! Orchestra, founded in England for Black and ethnically diverse musicians, alongside recitals in the Kleine Zaal by artists including pianist Rebeca Omordia and countertenor Reginald Mobley. With Festival Mind the Gap!, Het Concertgebouw invites audiences and the classical music world alike to discover these composers.

Black composers gaining ground
In recent years, the classical music world has shown growing interest in Black composers. The Chineke! Orchestra, founded to make the sector's increasing diversity visible on the stage as well as behind the scenes, performs Florence Price's First Symphony and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Violin Concerto, with Njioma Chinyere Grevious as soloist. Also on the programme are the Four Black American Dances by Carlos Simon, Concertgebouw's new Composer in Residence.

Orville Breeveld, ambassador of Black culture
A podcast on unjustly forgotten Black composers. A proposal for new street names in Amsterdam's composers' quarter, honouring Black and female composers. A concert series on composers of colour, a documentary series for NTR, and a celebratory concert marking fifty years of Surinamese independence. This is only a small selection of the work of Orville Breeveld, curator and programmer of Festival Mind the Gap!. For Breeveld, the less familiar the music, the greater the challenge of bringing it to a broad public. During the festival he also presents an edition of his own concept New Look Back, a keynote concert of music and storytelling, this time focused on Afro-American composers Julius Eastman and Florence Price.

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
The Concertgebouw Orchestra performs the work of Black composers with increasing regularity. In Festival Mind the Gap! it gives two concerts. The orchestra opens with the Dutch premiere of Pulse by the young American composer Brian Raphael Nabors. The programme closes with William Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony, a work that caused a sensation at its premiere at Carnegie Hall in 1934, with newspapers hailing it as the most distinctive and promising American symphonic work to date. It subsequently disappeared from the repertoire, but has attracted renewed attention from major American orchestras in recent years.
Wynton Marsalis's Trumpet Concerto (2022–23) is a spirited blend of blues, French Baroque and Louis Armstrong. The soloist is Miro Petkov, principal trumpet of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. American bass-baritone Davóne Tines performs a spiritual alongside the century-old Old Man River by Jerome Kern, familiar from the musical Show Boat, both in new orchestrations by Thomas Beijer.

Rebeca Omordia: African Pianism
Pianist Rebeca Omordia set out to find undiscovered African classical piano music for her research project and album series African Pianism. On the evening of Wednesday 17 June she presents her findings in a recital in the Kleine Zaal. As an ambassador for this repertoire, she also gave a masterclass to students of the Conservatorium van Amsterdam; the results will be heard during the free Lunchconcert on 17 June.

Countertenor Reginald Mobley with pianist Baptiste Trotignon
For Reginald Mobley, giving attention to Black composers is not merely a responsibility; it is his purpose. The music from his and pianist Baptiste Trotignon's album Because forms the basis for their recital: a programme of largely well-known Afro-American work songs and spirituals, alongside classical compositions by twentieth-century Black composers. In an interview with Het Concertgebouw, Mobley reflects: 'My direct connection to this repertoire is that I descend from enslaved African Americans. This is my history and my heritage, and more than that.'