Where would the Verbier Festival be without its two principal orchestras? For 2025, the Verbier Festival Orchestra (VFO) and the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra (VFCO) had six concerts apiece, and as ever, what struck in technical and interpretational terms was their respective abilities to combine highest-level orchestral playing with clearly meeting the vision of each fresh guest conductor, from Barbara Hannigan and Klaus Mäkelä to Teodor Currentzis and Leonardo García-Alarcón. Equally striking, though, was their respective human dynamics, as palpable friendships and enjoyment in the music fizzed out from the stage. So the further question is, how does each of these very differently organised ensembles manage to achieve such a combination of artistic and human-interaction heights in the context of such limited time to rehearse and simply be together?
How to Build an Orchestra: 98 Musicians and a Sports Coach
The answer is that none of this is the result of a mere lucky accident. To look first at the VFO, the Festival’s orchestral training programme for 18-28 year olds, membership in this body lasts for a maximum of three seasons, and its players have 5 weeks together each summer: the festival, preceded by three weeks of intensive rehearsal with coaches. Nationality-wise, it draws from all four corners of the world. For 2025, this all made for 98 musicians encompassing 23 different nationalities, with 53 first-timers, 29 on their second year, and 16 on their third.
The challenge therefore is one of many disparate parts needing to be moulded into a single, harmonious orchestral body within a very short period of time. The most challenging year of all was inevitably in 2000, the year of its foundation (as the UBS Festival Orchestra). Yet even then, the Verbier team was prepared. “To be given the funding to recruit internationally was fantastic, but we could see that it also presented psychological problems,” remembers festival founder Martin Engstroem. “You had the people from New York with beautiful instruments and Nike clothes, and people from Azerbaijan with old T-shirts and violins that were barely holding together.” There were linguistic barriers too, given the world in 2000 was still on the cusp of true globalisation. Engstroem’s solution was therefore to hire a sports coach, and to devote two intensive days at the start of their three-week training to getting these young people to know, respect and listen to each other in ways that could transcend their widely polarised backgrounds and spoken language hurdles. It worked, and the following year, with two thirds of the orchestra now returnees, the pattern was already set for a proactive camaraderie which saw the new first-years immediately scooped up and incorporated into the VFO family.
Planting Friendships and Playing Music
Camaraderie-creation has remained a VFO priority ever since, with many lifelong friendships formed as a result. Musicians are housed in groups of between 5 and 8, sharing rooms. Whole-orchestra social events are arranged, including a hike and a raclette night. Also the annual planting party, where one evening just before sunset they plant salad leaves in Festival-provided planters at a local school—part of the Festival’s VF Green sustainability initiative. “For a lot of them it’s the first time they’ve touched soil and planted anything,” says current Orchestras Manager Sam Goldscheider. “We get some beers, then they play music for the plants, and it’s perhaps the only moment of the festival where we don’t play music with our attention focused on the humans in Verbier, but instead consider the other life forms here. So they laugh and it’s fun.”
At the instrumental section level, there’s further independently initiated bonding. “We don’t have much extra time, because we rehearse six hours a day and also have to practice,” describes 2025 first-year violist Nicolás Bernal-Montaña. “But in the viola section this year we shared chocolate together before the concert, just to connect. We also went to dinner at our coach’s chalet.”
As for musical bonding, one successful experiment for 2025 was to have everyone prepare the whole repertoire before arrival. “Imagine you turn up to your sectional,” explains Goldscheider, “and you’ve spent two months preparing these six programs, and then the person next to you is trying to sight-read it. It’s the most frustrating thing.” By contrast, sections this year have been able, right from the start, to talk about music rather than fingerings.
“We Are One Team”: A Verbier Philosophy
The relationship between musicians and management isn’t forgotten either. “In some orchestras there’s a wall between musicians and management, and that’s precisely what we try to avoid,” emphasizes Goldscheider. “Our philosophy is that we are one team with the musicians—and it’s a two-way thing, with us asking them to work with and respect us too.”
Far from seeing a mere five weeks a year together as a stumbling block to creating unity, Goldscheider regards it as a positive advantage. “People aren’t bored with each other,” he points out, “and five weeks is long enough to really have a chance to get to know each other.”
At the end of their three years, VFO members who find it just too painful to contemplate their Verbier days being over have the chance to audition for the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra, itself now almost 20 years old, and since 2007 under the permanent musical direction of Gábor Takács-Nagy. Comprised chiefly—but not exclusively—of professional former VFO members, the ensemble gathers in Verbier the day before the festival begins and also tours internationally outside the Festival period, serving as the Festival’s worldwide ambassador. This latter remit has grown exponentially in recent years, with Spring 2025 seeing four touring destinations (including Mumbai and Korea) rather than the usual one, and its annual November Schloss Elmau residency followed for the first time by a Lugano concert.
With so many of its musicians holding positions in the world’s top orchestras, it necessarily requires a larger pool of players to draw from for these touring activities. But only a few are tried at a time—and crucially, it isn’t simply their instrumental abilities being considered. “What matters is that they can be in the vibe,” says VFCO violist Blythe Engstroem, who has been a member since its inaugural year.
“Gábor Is a Unique, Conventional Conductor”
This vibe—shaped and sustained by Takács-Nagy—is a social, human one that directly defines the VFCO’s unique musical personality: fearless, joyful, and collectively all-in.
“Gábor is a unique, conventional conductor,” says Blythe Engstroem. “His message is about lowering the ego, being in the service of music; and his way in rehearsal of bringing everything on the page to life—it chokes us up: how he describes a phrase, how he explains what Beethoven was living through and why he had to write this. We get goosebumps. We laugh. So while musically speaking it does take an hour or so to kind of find one another again when we regroup, it happens quickly because everyone wants to be there and to find each other again.”
That regrouping, in fact, begins even before the first rehearsal. “Gábor often writes down things that are important to him about a forthcoming concert program, then sends them via WhatsApp or other channels,” she explains. “There are always lots of pictures and emojis. We have tons of inside jokes about composers’ lives, his life, and ours, and these all get boiled down to little signs and symbols that get tossed around before a concert or onstage. He’s doing it to loosen everyone up—so we can share this music and the composer’s message with audiences in a very positive way that can bring musical healing to souls. It sounds really corny, but that really is it. And it’s why, even though the VFCO members are all professionals working at a very high level, they still have that spirit of pure, frustration-free joy in music and in being together.”
Gábor Takács-Nagy conducts Beethoven’s Seventh with the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra at the 2021 Verbier Festival.
The Perfection of Imperfection
“It’s really based on chamber music rules,” explains Takács-Nagy, whose early career was as founding first violinist of the Takács Quartet. “Everybody is inspiring, respecting, loving, and giving to each other—with a sense of freedom. With wind solos, for example, I’m always telling them: ‘I am giving you the frame with my conducting, but you are free to improvise within it, in terms of small colors and timings.’ And I feel this is what brings us together and forms our collective identity.”
What defines the VFCO’s sound and dynamic is not perfection. “I’m always telling them that when I met Manchester City FC Manager Pep Guardiola, I asked him what his final piece of advice was before sending his team onto the field. And he said it was to not try to be perfect. You are human—you might miss a penalty—but the one thing you can always do is to give your full heart.” He continues: “It’s the same with the VFCO. What the public hears most is when we are giving our full heart and soul. I’m always telling them: ‘Creativity starts where the control zone finishes. So go out there and play dangerously.’ And not being afraid that the conductor will be angry if you make a mistake—that’s what brings this extra dimension of energy and freedom.”
Equally football-inspired is the VFCO’s loud pre-performance ritual, done just before walking onstage. It was born in Verbier’s Pub Mont Fort, where Takács-Nagy and several VFCO musicians watched the July 2010 FIFA World Cup Final between Spain and the Netherlands. “It was a nil-nil draw at the end of normal time,” he recalls. “Then before extra time, the Spanish team got into this kind of hugging circle and shouted together. They won the match, and that night I said, ‘Let’s try it in our next concert!’ So we did, and we felt magic with it—liberated from the normal pre-concert anguishes, thinking instead of friendship, love, and strength. And this is how we can fly!”
Hence, “the hugging and the shouting” was born.
“The VFCO represents the perfection of imperfection—the perfection of expression,” sums up Blythe Engstroem. What’s more, this philosophy runs so deep that it remains even when a guest conductor is on the podium, as beautifully exemplified in 2025 by the orchestra’s Sibelius Symphony No. 5 with Klaus Mäkelä.
So next time you watch the VFCO, listen for the backstage shout—and sense the freedom. Next time you see the VFO and feel its unity, picture its players performing to baby lettuce plants at sunset. Two teams, differently structured and yet the same. All loving both music—and each other.
