Name: Biennale »Paradise Lost?« Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin with Nicholas Collon and Pekka Kuusisto
Start: 2025-02-16T20:00:00
Location: Berliner Philharmonie

Pekka Kuusisto

Nicholas Collon

Berliner Philharmoniker

More diversity in classical music! This is the objective which prompted the Chineke! Orchestra, founded 2015 in London, as a catalysator for change in order to achieve current diversity targets within the classical music world. As part of their joint European tour with the Cape Town Opera from South Africa, they will present George Gershwin’s masterpiece Porgy and Bess in a new semi-staged production at the Musikfest Berlin. Kwamé Ryan will conduct.

Chineke! Orchestra / Cape Town Opera

Benjamin Britten’s Sea Interludes from his hit opera Peter Grimes conclude with a violent storm. Here the tragic hero’s vision of happiness and inner peace is swept away by a final outburst from the orchestra. At the Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester Berlin’s concert conducted by Simone Young, they are followed by the Adagio from Gustav Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony: a “tornado of life” (Jens Malte Fischer) that was written in one of the deepest crises that the composer suffered in the last summer of his life. Oscillating layers dominate the soundscape of Sappho/ Bioluminescence by the Australian composer Liza Lim, before the evening ends with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5.

Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin I

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

Two compelling works from contrasting worlds: With lightness, elegance and wit, infused with Spanish rhythms, Manuel de Falla’s ballet The Three-Cornered Hat tells of a young wife who fends off the advances of a provincial governor. Leoš Janáček’s rhapsody Taras Bulba, by contrast, unfolds with elemental power, portraying the fate of a Ukrainian Cossack leader who loses first his two sons and then his own life in the struggle against Polish occupiers. Sir Simon Rattle, former Chief Conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker, also leads the world premiere of a concerto written by Cathy Milliken for our cor anglais player, Dominik Wollenweber.

Sir Simon Rattle conducts de Falla, Janáček and a World Premiere

Three different works explore liminal zones: beginning, transition, and end. In his new work, the Hungarian composer Márton Illés follows the path of the poet Felix Reinhuber on his search for the origins of language several millions of years ago. The Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and Ensemble Modern are brought together under the baton of Michael Wendeberg with the SWR Experimentalstudio from Freiburg in this speculative research into sound and speech in which the birth of language reveals a history of origins – full of possibilities, full of abundant potential. In contrast, They left us grief-trees wailing at the wall by Italian composer Clara Iannotta – following the traces of the poet Dorothy Molloy – focuses on the definitive end: lamenting, enigmatic and yet simultaneously full of the love of life. Her work echo from afar (ii) explores her experience of radiotherapy as well as the associated sounds as a sonic phenomenon.

Ensemble Modern / Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart / SWR Experimentalstudio

Berliner Philharmonie

Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat is a unique work: not an opera, but a play “to be read, to be played and to be danced”. Matthias Bundschuh’s staging of the music theatre can now be seen at this year’s Musikfest Berlin, following its much-lauded premiere at the 2025 Salzburg Festival in cooperation with the Salzburg Marionette Theatre. The marionettes for the production were designed by Georg Baselitz: Central to the painter, sculptor and graphic artist’s thinking was the idea that the marionettes should be created by the simplest means and reduced to their very essence. The distinguished artistic team is completed by the actor Dominique Horwitz as the speaker and a top-quality miniature orchestra that includes the violinist Isabelle Faust and her friends.

Salzburger Marionettentheater

Berliner Festspiele

With the beginning of the new artistic directorship of Aviel Cahn, the Deutsche Oper Berlin is undertaking a project which pushes boundaries: Karlheinz Stockhausens Mittwoch aus Licht can be experienced for the first time as a staged opera production in German-speaking countries and will be transformed into an immersive ritual by the multiple award-winning artistic duo Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg. It will be conducted by the new principal guest conductor and passionate Stockhausen specialist Maxime Pascal. The performance even departs from the theatre location for the spectacular helicopter string quartet in which the four string players each perform in different helicopters circling high above the audience – a unique live event for the entire city which will be documented on film and become part of the performance.

Deutsche Oper Berlin

As part of its 2026 European tour, the ensemble of the Kanze Noh Theater from Tokyo will visit Musikfest Berlin. Featuring Kiyokazu Kanze – the 26th Grand Master of the Kanze School – as its lead actor, the company will present three works of classical Noh theatre. The traditional Japanese theatre form was created around 700 years ago and is regarded as one of the oldest in the world. With its visual language, its sense of sound and its (musical) dramaturgy, Noh theatre has had a strong influence on European contemporary music. Its distinctive features include deliberately minimal means of expression, the use of masks and highly formalised physical movements. On the following day, Kiyokazu Kanze will offer unique insights into the world of Noh theatre as part of an education event reserved especially for children and young people.

Kanze Noh Theater

Following the guest performance on 21.9., Grand Master Kiyokazu Kanze will offer unique insights into the world of Noh theatre as part of an education event for Berlin pupils. As one of the oldest performing arts in the world, Noh was perfected in the 14th century by the artist Kan’ami and his son Zeami and has been survived almost unchanged to the present day, a period of some 700 years. As a musical theatre artform, Noh theatre combines singing, dancing and instrumental music. In poetic stories where dreams and reality meet along with the living and spirits, actors in Noh masks reveal the action in elegant, stylised movements. Its unique aesthetic and spirituality have had a lasting influence on European art and music. Noh was added to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list in 2008.

Educational Event Noh Theatre

Maurice Duruflé’s ethereal Requiem blends allusions to Gregorian chant with an enchanting play of timbres whose delicate musical texture is reminiscent of the skilled instrumentation of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. This all comes together to form a paradisiacal vision of heaven presented by the RIAS Kammerchor Berlin, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and conductor Justin Doyle at the Musikfest Berlin. The second half of the programme features Alfred Schnittke’s Requiem, a polystylistic fresco of sound, oscillating between humanism and the force of spiritual faith. Unlike many of the famous masses for the dead, the work largely dispenses with dramatic contrasts: the choir does not rejoice in glowing terms over God’s greatness but meditates quietly on the words it sings in lines that sound improvised.

RIAS Kammerchor Berlin II / Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin II

From apocalypse to apotheosis – in his Symphony No. 2, Gustav Mahler delves into one of humanity’s most profound questions: “Why have you lived?” His music traverses light and darkness, full of turmoil, sorrow, intimacy and earthy joy. Mahler pushed the boundaries of the symphony, incorporating folk songs from the cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn and, following Beethoven’s model, a magnificent choral finale. In this work, Mahler said, the listener is “struck down by clubs, only to be lifted to the highest heights on angels’ wings.” Daniel Harding conducts.