The Verbier Festival Orchestra (VFO) is a training orchestra of some 95 musicians that assembles each summer at the Verbier Festival in the Swiss resort town. The orchestra’s members, aged 8 to 28, are chosen through annual auditions and coached by players from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and other prominent orchestras. It was established in 2000 as the UBS Verbier Festival Orchestra, with James Levine as music director, but changed its name when the Swiss bank UBS withdrew its support in 2007. Charles Dutoit became music director in 2009, followed by Valery Gergiev from 2018 to 2021. The orchestra has yielded the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra, which consists of VFO alumni and tours internationally. In 2022 the festival partnered with Deutsche Grammophon to release recordings from the VFO’s archives, beginning with an album of Mendelssohn’s Piano Concertos Nos 1 and 2 (1831, 1837) featuring pianist Yuja Wang and conductor Kurt Masur, and a recording of Verdi’s Requiem (1874) conducted by Gianandrea Noseda.
