Name: Biennale »Paradise lost?« “The Four Seasons” with the Freiburger Barockorchester
Start: 2025-02-17T20:00:00
Location: Berliner Philharmonie

Daniela Lieb

Gottfried von der Goltz

Cecilia Bernardini

Eyal Streett

Berliner Philharmoniker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seemingly transparent, delicate and almost floating, the music of Peinture propelled Edison Denisov to become one of the leading modernists of what was then the Soviet Union – he formed the USSR’s troika of the non-conformist avantgarde together with Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina, whose works can also be heard at this year’s festival. Vladimir Jurowski and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin present this far too rarely performed orchestral work at Musikfest Berlin, before unveiling a genuine rediscovery with the Second Symphony by Anatol Vieru, who would have turned 100 this year. The Romanian composer wrote the work in West Berlin in 1973. The evening will be rounded off by the choral symphony The Bells, which Sergei Rachmaninoff considered one of his best works. The Rundfunkchor Berlin will sing alongside an ensemble of internationally renowned soloists.

Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin

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

Berliner Philharmonie

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.