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At the 12th Opera Gala in Bonn, international stars from the world’s biggest stages perform together on a single evening. They will delight audiences with a varied musical program at the highest level – accompanied by the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn and the Bonn Theatre Opera Chorus. All the artists performing waive their fees for a good cause.

Whips crack and bells tinkle, horses trot – we take you on a musical sleigh ride through a snowy winter wonderland with Leopold Mozart’s » Joke Symphony «. But where is the journey taking us? A palace appears on the horizon, where a costume ball is taking place…

Richard Wagner probably had the opposite in mind for Bayreuth to what we are presenting to our audience in the 5. Freitagskonzert: Namely an opera without a (visible) orchestra. We play his music, on stage: The Ring – a symphonic adventure! Henk de Vlieger has condensed the 15 hours of this major musical-theatrical event into a breathtaking 70 minutes. But let’s return to Bayreuth, where the orchestral musicians are »tucked away« underground, neither seen by the audience nor able to see anything of the hall or stage themselves: Perhaps this evening we can give you a little insight into the perspective of the Bayreuth orchestral musicians, many of whom say that Wagner close to the orchestra, without the » distracting« singers, is the greatest thing imaginable! The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Marvel’s fantastic film and comic universe are all related in one way or another to Wagner’s sex-and-crime story about gods, superheroes and a fateful ring. But Wagner’s musical theater work is much more: social revolutionary drama, utopian theater, biting social criticism! Above all: great, passionate, rousing music, from which many film music composers of our time have copied, and in which Wagner perfects one of his greatest inventions, the so-called leitmotif: Feelings, actions, characters, even things are given their own musical signet, a little theme or motif – a theme that we can sometimes trace from the beginning of the Ring to its end: for 15 hours, the leitmotifs fight and argue, love and quarrel, are lonely or in company. In our orchestral journey through the Ring, we experience its history as if in fast motion – but with the most important and best-known motifs, themes and pieces of music full of beauty! From the Ride of the Valkyries to the magic of fire, from Wotan’s farewell to Siegfried’s Rhine journey: » Hojotoho! Hojotoho! Heiaha! Heiaha! «

Power and greed, heroes and heroism, gender roles, the end of one era and the beginning of a new one: the themes of the Ring of the Nibelung are just as socially explosive today as they were 149 years ago at its premiere. After taking the complete adventure journey through Wagner’s tetralogy in Freitagskonzert, we focus on its grandiose conclusion, Götterdämmerung, in Im Spiegel. Bettina Böttinger and Antony Hermus not only immerse themselves in the more than life-size music of the work, but also ask about its relationship to our time: What do we sacrifice for power and prosperity? Who are our heroes? What is our understanding of the roles of men and women? Is there an unstoppable progress, or are we at the end of an era where something new must be born?

Ladies and gentlemen, we invite you to a serious concert at the Beethoven-Haus. Scientific and aesthetic … aesthetic … Aztec … whatever: questions of all kinds and music of all genres await you for your edification. Like the chameleon on the hood of a car, our musicians change color to give you a different kind of experience. Please dress appropriately. Your musicians of the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn PS: We recommend that those who are squeamish have some valerian tea in a thermos flask!

Koblenz is one of our regular guest venues and we are always delighted to be guests in a beautiful hall and with an enthusiastic audience. The backbone of the carefully curated symphony concert series in which we are allowed to participate are the concerts of the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie. The stage in Koblenz allows for large programs, so the Koblenz orchestra has had Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps on the program in the 2022/2023 concert season and Mahler’s 5th Symphony and Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Elijah in the past season. Following Also sprach Zarathustra in 2023/24, the BOB is now returning to the Rhein-Mosel-Halle with the Ride of the Valkyries through Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen.

In Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin sends his most famous character, his alter ego, on a great journey across the screen one last time: the Tramp. With a razor-sharp moustache, hopelessly out-of-position feet, big eyes and a big heart. As a guinea pig, a plaything of the powers that be in an industrialised, mechanised, dehumanised world. We see him at demonstrations, on roller skates, in various professions and, in one of the most iconic scenes in film history, in a factory of giant cogwheels. And we hear the Tramp – in his last film – for the first time. In 1936, the cinema public heard Charlie Chaplin’s voice for the first time, singing a wonderful nonsense song in a restaurant in this strange hybrid of silent and sound film. Modern Times is not only a profound search for happiness and a cinematic masterpiece, but also an acoustic treat. The score, composed by Chaplin himself, brings the film to life in our mind’s eye once we have seen it. And to make this happiness possible for as many people as possible, we are playing Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece at the Telekom Forum, conducted by Frank Strobel, one of the most important silent film specialists of our time.

There’s a lot going on in Vienna: devils are up to mischief, a fountain is bubbling with gold and a cockerel is laying eggs! What a load of rubbish, you think? Let’s take a stroll through this fantastic city with Viennese hits and see what else we come across.

For the first time, we are playing a work by Schumann in our popular Pur series. And we begin with his first symphony – a work not about spring, but about the longing for spring. The composer noted that he wrote the symphony at the end of the winter of 1841: » If I may say so, in that springtime urge that carries people away into old age and overtakes them anew every year. « What is this work, one of the first German symphonies after Beethoven, all about? It was written 14 years after the death of the »  titan «, who for decades led to a kind of » jam « for many composers who would have liked to write orchestral works. Spring could not have been composed in a more fulminant, yearning way than the 31-year-old Robert Schumann did in one of the happiest times of his chequered life …

 » Whether in the pub, the street or the hall, we celebrate the Bonn Carnival «,  » With Pappnaas or Höötche, we all sit in a Böötche «,  » Jeck jeht net weg « … These have been the mottos of the Bonn Carnival in recent years. Just like everyone else in Bonn, the Beethoven Orchestra turns up the heat at the height of the fifth season: In the carnival concert, our viola section sometimes performs as the wolf and the seven little goats or Snow White and the seven dwarfs, the GMD comes in overalls and the high politicians express themselves musically. But what if the motto of the session is  » colorful «? Highlighting the diversity and different histories of the Jeckinnen and Jecken? We got help from the inventor of the Muslim TÜV and father of Fathiland, Fatih Çevikkollu – together with Dirk Kaftan, he will guide you through our 2025 carnival concerts! There’s almost nothing that can’t happen in this colorful whirlwind … Alaaf!