Name: 75th ARD International Music Competition
Start: 2026-09-09T16:00:00
Location: Munich Residence

Bar Avni

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

75th ARD International Music Competition

Munich Residence

It is not an opera. Nor is it a song recital. Perhaps it is closer to a séance. At least that is how tenor Andrew Staples and BRSO harpist Magdalena Hoffmann envision this extraordinary “Watch This Space” concert, to which they have given the working title “Orpheus in the World of Song”. Fourteen songs by Robert Schumann and Benjamin Britten will not merely be performed – they will be woven together into an emotional, audio-visual map of the Orpheus myth. Alongside voice and harp, the performance will also feature selected poems by Rainer Maria Rilke as well as pen-and-ink drawings created by the artists specifically for this concert, accompanied by lighting and sound design that underscore and enrich the auditory experience. The result is an atmospheric space that could be Orpheus’s underworld – or something far beyond.

Watch This Space: Andrew Staples x BRSO

Industrial park IVG Business Park, Media Works Munich

BRSO Chief Conductor Sir Simon Rattle will open the season with Ludwig van Beethoven’s joyful Ninth Symphony, thus offering a first glimpse of the upcoming Beethoven Year 2027. For Rattle, it is the first – and perhaps the only – symphony that moves from immense heaviness and darkness to transcendental lightness, “as though it had taken a giant leap forward in time to Bruckner’s own Ninth Symphony and travelled into the idealistic world of the Enlightenment embodied by Mozart’s Magic Flute”. Rattle precedes Beethoven’s Ninth with Johann Sebastian Bach’s solemn cantata O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort, performed on period instruments. For Beethoven’s Ninth, the BRSO then switches to modern instruments; the outstanding soloists are equally at home in both worlds.

Sir Simon Rattle | Beethoven 9

St. Stephan's Cathedral

“The Psalms are poems of exaltation, but also of anger and judgment, and even of curses,” wrote Igor Stravinsky about his Symphony of Psalms. The work was composed during a time of personal tragedy. Tuberculosis had afflicted the composer’s family: his wife and his eldest daughter contracted the disease and eventually died from it. “It is not a work that offers easy consolation, and the God it portrays can be stern, even cruel,” says Sir Simon Rattle. Yet the symphony is equally suffused with moments of otherworldly serenity and beauty. It is framed by the sombre Chant funèbre, the otherworldly five-minute miniature Le roi des étoiles (which Debussy deemed performable only on “Sirius and Aldebaran”), and the once-scandalous classic Le sacre du printemps. An all-Stravinsky concert, rich in contrasts, colours, and surprises.

Sir Simon Rattle | Strawinsky

Gasteig HP8

British-born Sir Stephen Hough seems to defy categorisation: he is at once a pianist, composer, writer, and polymath – and a musician of extraordinary curiosity with a penchant for unconventional perspectives. This is particularly evident in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s famous Third Piano Concerto. The late-Romantic “Rach 3” is considered one of the most demanding works in the concerto repertoire and places almost superhuman demands on the soloist, which is why it is sometimes referred to as the “Concerto for Elephants” – according to one calculation, its piano part contains more notes per second than any major piano concerto. Combined with the two electrifying Stravinsky works in the second half of the concert and BRSO Chief Conductor Sir Simon Rattle on the podium, this promises to be a truly thrilling musical experience.

Sir Simon Rattle & Sir Stephen Hough

The biblical Book of Genesis provided the inspiration for commissioning seven concise works from seven different composers: Lisa Streich (Sweden), Francesco Filidei (Italy), Chen Yi (China/USA), Hannah Kendall (England), Mikel Urquiza (Spain), Saad Haddad (USA), and Mark Andre (Germany). These new Genesis compositions will be performed after the overture from Darius Milhaud’s ballet La création du monde has already set the musical theme. They will be followed by Kaija Saariaho’s last completed work, the trumpet concerto Hush, written for the jazz trumpeter Verneri Pohjola. Finally, we will turn our attention to the soaring geyser fountains of Iceland, which Jón Leifs, a native of the world’s largest volcanic island and a composer of extraordinary sonic power, translated into musical form and energy.

Matthias Pintscher

Sir Simon Rattle & Sir Stephen Hough | Guest concert in Milan

Teatro alla Scala

The title may sound playful, but Antonín Dvořák’s Scherzo capriccioso surprises audiences with its dramatic energy, dance-like vitality, and imaginative orchestral writing – and will receive its first performance by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. It will be followed by a work of particular significance to Chief Conductor Sir Simon Rattle: Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, To the Memory of an Angel, composed after the death of the eighteen-year-old Manon Gropius, daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius. Soloist Isabelle Faust will bring to this profoundly moving work the balance of grief, consolation, and remembrance that makes it so extraordinary. Finally, Franz Schubert’s “Great” Symphony in C major, with its epic scope, points far into the future. It represents the pinnacle of the composer’s symphonic output – and serves as the concert’s monumental conclusion.

Sir Simon Rattle & Isabelle Faust

Anton Bruckner dismissed his Symphony in F minor as a mere “student work”. Yet it is far more than that. The first symphony he completed, it reveals a composer setting out with extraordinary ambition – yet it was never performed during his lifetime. For conductor Simone Young, it testifies to Bruckner’s hope of establishing himself as one of the great symphonists of the 19th century: “It promises that perseverance and dedication to one’s calling will ultimately prevail.” This will be the symphony’s first performance by the BRSO. The concert will open with Bach’s Ricercar a 6 in Anton Webern’s colourful orchestral arrangement. In between the two works will be one of the great classics of the repertoire, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor – performed by Augustin Hadelich, whose intensity and sensitivity have established him as one of the outstanding violinists of our time.