Name: Animal Carnival
Start: 2025-03-02T11:00:00
Location: Theater Bonn Opera House

Experience a month of musical storytelling with Beethoven Orchester Bonn's February events. From Wagner’s epic tales to Chaplin's cinematic adventures and the vibrant sounds of Vienna, each performance invites audiences to explore timeless themes through music. This lineup offers a diverse tapestry of orchestral and chamber music that resonates with societal reflections, cultural heritage, and artistic innovation. Whether you're a seasoned music lover or a curious newcomer, these performances promise to captivate and inspire.

A Symphony of Themes: Exploring Beethoven Orchester Bonn's February Lineup

The Beethoven Orchester Bonn is set to electrify audiences with an eclectic series of events in 2025. From the flamboyant 'Colorful Carnival Concert' to the soul-stirring 'Requiem', this cultural journey will celebrate diversity, creativity, and heritage. Dive into a vibrant world where Spanish influences, Parisian melodies, and Bulgarian voices intertwine, offering a rich tapestry of musical experiences. Join us as we explore a series of events that promise to entertain, enlighten, and engage, showcasing the orchestra's versatility and commitment to cultural exploration.

Bonn's Vibrant Carnival: A Symphony of Colors, Cultures, and Creations

Hermes Helfricht

Beethoven Orchester Bonn

A new space! One that hasn't yet been explored, researched, earned: This is the joy we've been blessed with with the Beethoven Hall's new studio! It's a truly state-of-the-art small concert hall. Versatile, clear, capable of even the softest tones. We'd like to inaugurate our rehearsal and concert hall with the most classic of all pieces: Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 is on the program for our first Pur concert of the season. As always in this series: a concert for beginners and experts, for old hands and newbies.

Beethoven 5

Beethoven Hall

Even though our Christmas concert in the Kreuzkirche has become a beloved tradition, it is far from routine: the Christmas customs of the countries we visit musically, the moods and languages ​​of different styles and ensembles are too diverse. This year we're traveling back to Germany's past: Christmas with "Papa Bach" in a small Silesian village or with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy in Berlin. In the 1820s, there was already a Christmas market there with over 100 stalls, the sensation perhaps being the evening illuminations, which contrasted with the darkness in which much of the city was shrouded at night.

Lights in the Darkness

We've long been asked to perform Beethoven's 9th Symphony on New Year's Day. And now: our first New Year's concert in the newly opened Beethoven Hall! What better time than today to sing Beethoven's message of peace and joy to the world? We look forward to outstanding soloists and our partner choir, the Bonn Philharmonic Choir, whose members will help us anchor the Beethoven Hall in Bonn's cultural heart.  And we're also looking forward to the winner of the Telekom Beethoven Competition, who will join us in playing the first notes of the new year in the hall for everyone to enjoy.

New Year's Concert

In the Mirror: This is our series for curious music fans, for those who think outside the box, for those for whom classical music is a part of our present, a reflection of our lives. The Spiegel concerts will take place on Thursday evenings for the first time this season. At the first concert in the series, our presenter Bettina Böttinger will meet the exceptional musician Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the top conductor Thomas Dausgaard – the latter our first guest conductor in the Beethoven Hall since the reopening celebrations.  The focus of the evening will be the Second Violin Concerto by Hungary's national composer, Béla Bartók.

Hungarian

International splendor in the newly renovated Beethoven Hall: The Beethoven Orchestra meets Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard, who conducts at all the major venues worldwide, and world-class violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, a creative free spirit who repeatedly shakes the foundations of the "classical music business" and seeks to break down rigid structures. For his debut with the Beethoven Orchestra, Thomas Dausgaard has chosen Johannes Brahms's dark Fourth Symphony: a yearning work that simultaneously pays homage to the musical past – especially Johann Sebastian Bach – and looks far into the future.

Past and Future

In a little house right under a big tree and by a river teeming with fish, Little Bear and Little Tiger live a wonderful life. They are happy with everything they have and who they are. Until one day, a crate of bananas from Panama washes ashore—the beginning of a great journey to an unknown land! With new acquaintances, inventiveness, the question of what we need most in our lives, and the realization that our dream land can be anywhere.

Oh, how beautiful is Panama

What, pray tell, is a cornet? One could say it's the soft, rounded sister of the radiant trumpet. Where the trumpet blares, the cornet caresses. French composers, in particular, employ it when a brass instrument's color is needed, perhaps for a love scene, a painful farewell, a yearning cantilena. For the first time, our principal trumpeter Sandro Hirsch, together with his colleagues, presents the cornet in a chamber concert with the Beethoven Orchestra, with two works for the same instrumentation: Danish and French Romanticism, flanked by the quintessential Impressionist string quartet: Ravel's only, mysterious, and rhythmically pulsating String Quartet in F major.

Cornet & Friends

Beethoven-Haus Bonn

Chickens juggle eggs, donkeys can barely escape amorous horses, and fish perform an addictive dance in their colorful, shimmering scales. THIS is the Carnival of Animals! The biggest animal spectacle of the year, the most unforgettable show, the most exhilarating gathering—and with you, it's even better!

Carnival of Animals

The Bonn Orchestra is back in "its" hall in the heart of the city. Reason enough for us to ask questions about the Rhineland, Bonn, the Beethoven Hall - in short, about the topic of home, together with actor Matthias Brandt, who grew up in Bonn. In our second concert, " Im Spiegel, " texts by great authors, our own reflections, and music combine to create a greater whole: a Rhenish pastiche, in which Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Rheinische Kirmestänze and Robert Schumann's Symphony No. 3, the Rhenish Symphony , are not to be missed. 

Home

Two years ago, we began our concert on the Domplatte, even before Brings came on stage, with a few bars of music that probably every older person in the Rhineland knows: the beginning of Robert Schumann's Symphony No. 3, the so-called Rhenish Symphony . Condensed into just a few bars, this opening was a TV jingle on Hier und Heute for years and stood for our entire state.

Rhenish

Each of our carnival concerts is a tribute to the magnificent Rhenish traditions. But in 2026, we have two reasons to celebrate the Prince and Bonna, all the revelers in the hall, and the Bonn Carnival Festival Committee: 200 years ago, Bonn officially celebrated its first carnival – and officiality is especially important in the Rhineland: not only because people like to follow it, but also because they like to subvert and undermine it. Thus, the founding of the Bonn Carnival Society on February 5, 1826, is the nucleus of our present-day carnival. Supported by competent carnivalists, we will embark on a tour de force through 200 years of Bonn Carnival. Hopefully, the newly renovated hall will survive our musical firecrackers and the thunderous 'alaaf' of 1,800 costumed revelers in the hall...

200 Years of Bonn Carnival – jestern, hück and morje

So long we're still alive, Denn wenn et Trömmelche jeit, Echte Fründe , or Et jitt kei Wood – we all know them, the big hits of our favorite and most colorful season. Some of these songs are more than 30 years old, can you believe it? And Carnival is even older! But what did people listen to and sing on these crazy days 200 years ago? Come with us on a carnival journey through time!

The short history of Carnival

Elephants stomp, fish bubble and lions roar. They come together to celebrate the craziest time of the year – carnival! They gather in the arena, confetti flies and we sway along! And one or two surprise guests have also been announced. Stay tuned and come along!

Animal Carnival

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