(Credit: Gewandhausorchester Leipzig official website)

The Gewandhausorchester Leipzig has announced the postponement of its famed Mahler’s Festival and will now take place in 2023.

The Mahler Festival 2021 was to have taken place at the Gewandhaus from May 13 to May 24, 2021, but “the unpredictability of the perpetually developing Covid pandemic accounts for infinite imponderables in the realms of event and travel planning,” said an official statement on the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig website.

“In order to ensure sufficient planning reliability for our audiences, our guest orchestras, conductors, choruses, and soloists, and for the Gewandhaus itself as host, it is, regrettably, necessary to postpone the Festival until 2023. The program of the International Mahler Festival 2023 is scheduled to be published before the culmination of the current season,” concluded the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig’s statement.

The German government has extended the state of the hard lockdown until at least March 7, 2021. However, the rapid spread of novel and highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 variants in Europe has introduced another level of uncertainty which makes long-term planning in the current situation almost impossible.