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Film classics brought back to life! Every season, the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra celebrates the 100th anniversary of a legendary silent film. In 2025, they will continue the multimedia series for eyes and ears with the live-to-projection performance of a veritable cinematographic icon of the horror genre: The Phantom of the Opera, directed by Rupert Julian, first shown in New York in 1925 and today recognized by the Library of Congress as "particularly valuable in terms of cultural history". At the time, the film was already the second film adaptation of the French novel Le Fantome de l'Opéra by Gaston Leroux. The gruesome Phantom has now wreaked havoc on the screen a dozen times. But only Rupert Julian's adaptation became a cinematic classic - not least thanks to Lon Chaney in the title role, the US actor and make-up artist also known as "The Man with a Thousand Faces". In 1996, Carl Davis, who sadly passed away in 2023, composed a new soundtrack, opulently orchestrated with a large apparatus, including an organ. Adrian Prabava, who had already directed the successful productions of Sunrise and Robin Hood for us, returns to the symphony orchestra's podium .

Schwarz-Weiß? Farbe! 2015 gewann er den Münchner ARD-Musikwettbewerb, und seine Karriere als Solist, Kammer- und Orchestermusiker nahm ihren steilen Verlauf: Sébastian Jacot, 1987 in Genf geboren, war nach einer Zwischenstation im Leipziger Gewandhausorchester seit 2022 einer der beiden Solo-Flötisten der Berliner Philharmoniker. Bei uns brilliert er mit gleich zwei Konzerten - mit La Notte von Vivaldi, der darin nächtliche Geister weckt, sowie mit dem spielfreudigen Konzert des deutschen Spätromantikers Carl Reinecke. Am Pult: die 1988 in Saarbrücken geborene Dirigentin Ruth Reinhardt, die vor allem in den USA, aber auch in Europa schon große Karriere machte. Ganz nebenbei ist sie seit 2020 auch Saarlandbotschafterin. Brahms und Hindemith zählen zu ihren Favoriten. Und die dirigiert sie auch bei uns. Deshalb erklingt zum Abschluss Hindemiths großartige Mathis-Symphonie, inspiriert von den opulenten Tafelbildern des Isenheimer Altars. Schwarz-Weiß? Farbe!

Anyone who has their eyes open for the beauty of the spiral staircase in the foyer in the Volker Staab building and at the same time their ears open for chamber music from various eras will be enchanted by both. Around 200 years after its premiere, Schubert's most popular chamber music work, his octet for mixed ensemble, is coming to the house. You shouldn't miss what happens when the different movements of the large-scale work are heard in different parts of the house, when space and sound merge together.

Competition? Love! Copland, Barber, Bernstein - a big summit meeting of the most famous and best-known US national classics. Their music conjures up the American way of life in the concert hall. Copland's Outdoor Overture takes you to a rural setting, while Gershwin's Concerto in F captures the bustling city life in a competition between piano and orchestra. Competition? Love! Of course, our hit parade of American Classics includes Bernstein's global musical success, which projects Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet love tragedy onto New York's West Side. Our guests are two young "China stars" who have already enjoyed great success around the world and are now at home in the USA: the pianist Ying Li and the conductor Yue Bao, both graduates of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where Samuel Barber and Leonard Bernstein studied.

Little Rock? Hollywood! The first part of the evening takes us into the dazzling musical world of the dream factory. Master arranger Robert Russel Bennett titled his symphonically brilliant medley of immortal melodies by "the great George" Gershwin in Hollywood . This is followed by music by the living Hollywood legend Danny Elfman, composer of the soundtracks to The Simpsons, Batman, Spider-Man and countless others. After 2019, Vivi Vassileva, a German star percussionist with Bulgarian roots who electrifies audiences around the world, will be joining us as the soloist in his brand new percussion concert. Little Rock? Not only was Hilary Clinton born in the capital of the US state of Arkansas, but also a great woman in American music history sixty years earlier: Florence Price, the first African-American composer to make her voice heard. Her masterful fourth and final symphony from 1945 was not played for the first time until 2018. It is conducted by Gregor Mayrhofer, who has previously assisted Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic and worked with soloists such as Khatia Buniatishvili and Daniil Trifonov.

Question? Answer! They are finally coming together to make music together: our chief conductor Jonathan Darlington and his older brother, the celebrated concert organist and highly respected church musician from Oxford, Stephen Darlington. He has brought a work to Nuremberg that allows him to pull out all the stops of the Meistersingerhalle organ and his own art of organ playing. It is the breathtaking, overwhelming, but rarely heard in this country, organ symphony by the US national classic Aaron Copland, composed in the "Roaring Twenties". The organ symphony is contrasted with a "secret" symphony. Tchaikovsky's 3rd Suite is in fact a veritable symphony in terms of dimension and design, including waltzes and a sequence of variations. In between: the enigmatic orchestral piece "The Unanswered Question" by the pioneer of real American art music, Charles Ives. His question: where does music come from, where does music go? Our answer: Definitely from Tchaikovsky to Copland!

Sitting still becomes difficult, remaining emotionally untouched and not being carried away becomes virtually impossible. Because wherever Uwaga! performs, the quartet captivates the audience within seconds with its ecstatic joy of playing. In their new program, the "classical innovators from the Ruhr area", as the WAZ called them, together with the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Rasmus Baumann, cover a wide range of music history. From the Renaissance to the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods and then on to jazz and rock'n'roll, the amazed audience is catapulted to the latest pop hits. Mozart, Haydn, Wagner & Co., Stevie Wonder, the Beatles and Metallica are united under the aegis of Uwaga!. With a unique mixture of humor, passion, audacity and virtuosity, the ensemble makes everything its own, deconstructing the styles, reassembling them and thus ensuring ever-surprising excursions into the various eras. Climb into the time machine for a wild ride through the music from the past to the present!

Tickets for this choir concert with the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra are only available from the usual advance ticket sales offices or directly from the Hans Sachs Choir.

An event of the Peter-Vischer-Schule in cooperation with the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra. Advance ticket sales from January 8, 2025 online via the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra webshop.

The foyer is only there for the break - but why? This time we are daring to do something special: we are transforming the foyer with its cool atmosphere and also the music hall of our orchestra's own venue into a veritable exhibition hall to bring music and art lovers together. Nine large-format originals by the Nuremberg artist Manfred Hürlimann will be exhibited in the foyer of the music hall and the pictures will be in direct contact with the music. For the visitors, the dance-like sounds of the piano trio from the Romantic and Modern periods meet the power of Hürlimann's pictures of the classical muses of antiquity. In his three concert parts, both worlds transform the foyer and the music hall into a space that you have definitely never seen or experienced before.