Name: A Ravel evening with Seong-Jin Cho
Start: 2025-04-29T19:00:00
Location: Berliner Philharmonie

The Berliner Philharmonie is abuzz with excitement as it hosts a compelling series of events that promise to captivate music enthusiasts and cultural connoisseurs alike. From the jubilant 50th anniversary of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie to the thought-provoking discourse on political dynamics in Germany, the Philharmonie is a hub of artistic and intellectual engagement. Highlights include the renowned Easter Festival in Baden-Baden featuring timeless operatic masterpieces, and intimate lunch concerts offering a diverse mix of musical genres. Join us in exploring the vibrant tapestry of events that define this cultural epicenter.

A Symphony of Sound: Celebrating Musical Mastery at the Berliner Philharmonie

Seong-Jin Cho

Berliner Philharmoniker

The composer Sofia Gubaidulina who died in March 2025 once admitted: “while I am composing, I pray”. The heightened intensity of her Concerto for Viola and Orchestra oscillates between “down-to-earthness” and “heavenly aspiration”. Sir Antonio Pappano presents the work with ‘his’ London Symphony Orchestra along with the unfinished 9th Symphony by Anton Bruckner. Its dedication to “dear God” indicates what Bruckner was attempting to express in music that was literally composed on his deathbed: a confrontation with the “ultimate questions” in the style of a monumental “sinfonia da chiesa”.

London Symphony Orchestra

Das Konzert mit der Maus premieres in Berlin, inviting you to the Philharmonie Berlin to enjoy the thrilling music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and exciting amusing and factual stories inspired by the life of the composer. The legendary mouse will be accompanied by the presenters Jana Forkel and Johannes Büchs and the WDR Sinfonieorchester – together they will investigate the Austrian child prodigy. A concert full of discoveries, learning and experiences.

Das Konzert mit der Maus

Hans Werner Henze had already become a legend during his lifetime. To mark the centenary of his birth, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester conducted by Alan Gilbert marks its debut at Musikfest Berlin alongside pianist Tamara Stefanovich with a performance of Henze’s Preludes for piano, tapes and orchestra with the enigmatic title Tristan. This is poignant funeral music containing quotations from works such as Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 which also features in this concert.

NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester

Literature, like music, reflects the world and our lives. With our new series, Satzwechsel, we place the two in dialogue. Three times each season, in collaboration with the internationales literaturfestival berlin, we invite renowned authors to the Kammermusiksaal. They read from their latest works and discuss their writing. Music runs alongside: members of the Berliner Philharmoniker perform chamber works that echo and extend the themes of the texts.

Satzwechsel Literature & MusicSatzwechsel Literature

Berliner Philharmonie

Only a few days before the premiere of the opera Mittwoch aus Licht, Titus Engel devotes himself in his first concert as conductor in residence with the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin to a scene from another day of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s week-long opera cycle – the second act of Donnerstag aus Licht. The purely instrumental section Michaels Reise um die Erde depicts the travels of a hero culminating in an ascension to heaven. There are clear parallels here to the journey of Parsifal which was profoundly characterised by Richard Wagner’s affinity with religious spirituality, and the evening concludes with extracts from this work. John Cage’s 4′33″, a composition that reoriented and challenged listening habits through the discovery of musical rests as sonic space, acts as a connecting element between these works, attuning the ear to a quasi-sacred atmosphere.

Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin

Kleiner Saal

Festive radiance, symphonic solemnity and challenging virtuosity maintain a perfect balance in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C major. The work opens the concert given by the Staatskapelle Berlin conducted by Christian Thielemann which features a benchmark interpretation by the legendary pianist Rudolf Buchbinder who can look back on a career of more than 60 years. The second half is devoted to Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 whose sonorous natural idylls including the “song of the great tit Zizipe” (Bruckner) communicate a “religious and mysterious Romanticism à la Lohengrin” in the words of the composer.

Staatskapelle Berlin

You can simply go to a concert at the Philharmonie, spontaneously, during your lunch break – and with free admission: every Wednesday at 13:00 between September and June. The programme lasts 40 to 50 minutes: chamber music, piano works or a percussion duo – everything from Tchaikovsky to tango. Members of the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Karajan-Akademie regularly perform, as well as guests from the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, the Staatskapelle Berlin and the Berlin music conservatories. As can be expected at a lunch concert, catering is available from 12 noon until shortly before the concert begins.

Lunch concert

After its spectacular debut at the Musikfest Berlin in 2024, the Vienna Philharmonic returns in a new guest appearance, on this occasion with the conductor Tugan Sokhiev. The three-time Grammy award winner Hilary Hahn is the soloist in Antonín Dvořák’s brilliant Violin Concerto which guarantees a buoyant lightness not only in its thrilling final movement thanks to the influence of Czech folk dances. Sergei Prokofiev also selected the artistic form of dance for his musical depiction of the probably most famous love story of all time: the tragedy Romeo and Juliet based on William Shakespeare.

Wiener Philharmoniker

What a career! Brett Dean spent 14 years as a violist with the Berliner Philharmoniker before leaving to concentrate full-time on his highly successful career as a composer. He now returns to his former orchestra as Composer in Residence. To launch his residency, Brett Dean himself takes the podium for a programme of richly imaginative sound worlds: In Conversations with Schumann, he explores the composer’s intricate inner life. And once I played Ophelia is a moving portrait of Hamlet’s beloved, while Beggars and Angels draws its musical tension from the contrast between earthly and celestial beings. An arrangement of Debussy completes the programme.

Brett Dean conducts Brett Dean

The Ensemble Resonanz from Hamburg presents an eccentric programme full of creative surprises and contradictions in Berlin. The musical compass becomes disoriented by a dizzying alternation of places, times, styles and ideas. Milica Djordjević unleashes the forces of nature and evokes the energy of noise, Benjamin Britten soothes the spirits of the modern age and a leap back into the French Baroque reveals the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau as a visionary. The new work by Enno Poppe creates an enigmatic connection back into a time when the moods of our tonal system were still vividly coloured and nothing was standardised.

Ensemble Resonanz

When this musician sits down at the organ, it sounds as though a complete symphony orchestra is playing – including sophisticated solos on flutes, trombones and other wind instruments. This is because Shin-Young Lee loves programmes in which she can combine original repertoire with organ transcriptions of famous orchestral works. Alongside Marie-Pierre Langlamet, harpist of the Berliner Philharmoniker, the internationally renowned organist presents a spectacular programme at the Musikfest Berlin ranging from Liszt’s virtuoso concert etude Un sospiro  (creating the impression of three hands at the keyboard) to Louis Vierne’s showpiece Carillon de Westminster.

Matinee: Organ & Harp

For the fifth time, the Kulturforum Berlin will be transformed into a large stage for the summer festival Ein Tag im Grünen.

Tag im Grünen 2026

Kulturforum

Seong-Jin Cho loves the “incredible wealth of colours” and “often orchestral sound” of Maurice Ravel's piano music, where he finds a special form of sensitivity. He sees in Ravel  “a person who smiles gently, but with tears in his eyes”. To mark the 150th anniversary of the French composer's birth, our Artist in Residence will perform Ravel's complete works for solo piano, including the gravitational Pavane pour une infante défunte, the mysterious Gaspard de la nuit and the sometimes lively, sometimes dreamy Valses nobles et sentimentales.

A Ravel evening with Seong-Jin Cho

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