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With the song "Waterloo", the then unknown Swedish pop band ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton in 1974. This performance was the start of a rapid international career. With "SOS", "Mamma Mia", "Dancing Queen", "Thank You for the Music" and "The Winner Takes It All", the four musicians took the hearts of millions of people by storm and the charts around the world. Experience the unforgettable music of a band that wrote pop history like no other!

When you think of serenades, you probably think of summer evenings, nature, conviviality, and cheerfulness. Mozart captured this relaxed mood in numerous works. But serenades can also focus on the dark side of life, on the hidden and unspoken. This is what Benjamin Britten had in mind when he set six poems, all of which revolve around the theme of "night," to music in the middle of the Second World War. He uses the unusual instrumentation of tenor, horn, and strings to create sound effects that range from sparse to sensual, from defiant to melancholic. Antonín Dvořák, on the other hand, gave his wind serenade of 1878 a slightly nostalgic touch, effectively combined with Bohemian dance music. And here, too, there is a festival of tonal colors!

There is rarely so much greatness in a small piece in a single work. Schubert's Octet for three wind instruments and five strings is both chamber and orchestral music, it is a cheerful serenade and symphonic seriousness, it presents eight individuals as a close-knit community. With this work, Schubert wanted nothing less than to "pave the way to the great symphony" after a serious illness, and he succeeded in doing so in a fascinating way, relaxed and highly concentrated at the same time. Almost 60 minutes of pure musical enjoyment - that is his Octet. The violinist Annegret Klenke leads the work as a guest, the primaria of the multi-award-winning Klenke Quartet, which was founded in Weimar in 1991.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor – never heard of him? Well, the son of an Englishwoman and a doctor from Sierra Leone, he caused a sensation in London around 1900. His "Hiawatha" cantata was a sensational success, and Elgar personally supported him. Coleridge-Taylor's declared aim was the symbiosis of African and European musical traditions, which he achieved most impressively in his Symphonic Variations op. 63 on the spiritual "I'm Troubled in Mind", a 20-minute orchestral masterpiece

Franz Liszt once described the Loh Orchestra, which had always remained loyal to him, as a "great miracle, locked up in a small town" . It is therefore only logical that the Thuringian Liszt Biennale will also stop in Sonderhausen in 2025, this year under the motto "Landscapes of the Soul". Liszt's E-flat major concerto provides insights into such an inner landscape, as it occupied the composer for more than 20 years. The framework is made up of works by Liszt's son-in-law Richard Wagner and Ferruccio Busoni, who followed in Liszt's footsteps as a pianist and lecturer. His "Berceuse élégiaque" is a son's touching farewell to his deceased mother.