Classical music is rarely experienced in such a relaxed, informal setting. The lunch concerts of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra make it possible: On a flying visit to Hamburg? A bit of time during your lunch break? Looking for an idea for a group outing? Every one or two months, you can simply drop by the Brahms Foyer of the Laeiszhalle on a Tuesday afternoon. You don't even need a ticket for these chamber music delicacies. Entry is free, but places are limited (and the seats even more limited!). There is just a donation box at the exit - for anyone who enjoyed it.

flute, clarinet, bassoon and horn

Laeiszhalle Hamburg

Senta's dreams are directed towards the sea: will the man who will free her from her restricted life at home come from there? It begins stormily; Wagner's first fully valid opera presents a grandiose, overwhelming vision of the elements already in the overture. The fate of the Flying Dutchman and the woman who is to redeem him takes place in the roar of the waves and the ocean. This "romantic opera" aims to transcend boundaries - between tradition and future music, between land and sea, between convention and revolution. The result is a thrilling drama telling the story of a young woman who refuses to submit, who puts all her stakes on one card in order to transcend her boundaries, even if it costs her her life.

EPSG:4326

Der fliegende Holländer

Staatsoper Hamburg

Change of conductor: Jonathan Bloxham will lead works by Dvořák and Schubert instead of Semyon Bychkov with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra. Violinist Karen Gomyo will make her debut with Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 - on January 9th and 10th.

Jonathan Bloxham & Karen Gomyo

Elbphilharmonie Hamburg

This opera is the world in a theatrical nutshell: it deals with growing older, with trials and tribulations, with intransparent decisions. One person searches for individuality, another is too lazy to do so. Others postulate that the community is the only adequate place for the individual. Power has either been legitimised by long tradition or usurped by new regimes. Values such as assimilation and loyalty are set against self-assertiveness and independence. There is loving and dreaming, cheating and trusting. Suicides are prevented, tests passed, adventures survived. Who is right? Who has been wronged? The world of the magic flute is opaque, and everyone is looking for a pathway: within it, into it or out of it. Who holds the reigns? Who can be trusted? Could it be music?

Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute)

When John Cage consults the oracle, the Ensemble Resonanz plunges into the play, letting everyday life rustle and all certainties disappear. Music crackles and creeps, grows in untamed urge, like a plant searching for light. Moritz Eggert builds castles out of sand, Enno Poppe whispers evolution to us, we find sounds we weren't looking for - and Dirk Rothbrust sets the pulse.

urban string »child of tree«

resonanzraum

Violinist Karen Gomyo will also make her debut "terribly un-amplified": On January 11, 2025, she will be performing up close and personal with members of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in the club in St. Pauli.

horribly unreinforced: Karen Gomyo

ByteFM - Radio für gute Musik

Whenever it is important to convey the impression of enormous agility, of a rapid, glorious final spurt, by means of carefully selected music for moving images, the film and advertising industries like to use the well-known gallop from the William Tell Overture. However, this unspeakable habit creates a completely wrong impression of the entire overture to Rossini's last opera. Who would even think of expecting the same piece of art to contain the wonderful interplay of the solo cellos at the beginning, or the refreshing freshness provided by the English horn and flute after the great thunderstorm - or indeed the entire width of the canvas that Rossini illustrated for his magnificent overture?

Bruch Violin Concerto and Brahms 2nd

Bringing Gustav Mahler's "The Song of the Earth" to the stage always leads into the depths of the late romantic aesthetic of the turn of the century. Of course, the basis of the work is poetry - but of a rather dubious nature due to the many translations back and forth from ancient Chinese. And so the six songs, of which the last is by far the most important, are actually to be understood primarily from the perspective of the music and in a sense as Mahler's unofficial ninth symphony. At least that is how he himself suggested it - and also emphasized that "The Song of the Earth" is "probably the most personal ... thing I have done so far." Stuart Skelton and Karen Cargill sing the version for tenor and alto here.

5th Philharmonic Concert

Change of conductor: Jonathan Bloxham is now taking over from Semyon Bychkov at the podium of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra. He conducts two Romantic works in one hour: Dvořák's concert overture "Othello" and Schubert's Symphony No. 2.

Classic Compact with Jonathan Bloxham

The wish sounds presumptuous: a ladies' string trio from the Far East (Japan, Taiwan, China) gathered one fine morning in one of the most beautiful houses in the metropolis of Hamburg and invited a world-class Swedish pianist to join them in playing the finest chamber music pearls from Russian, Spanish, Argentinian, Polish and Thuringian pens... How lucky we are!

soloists from the orchestra

When Haggai Cohen-Milo describes his approach to creatively engaging with works of concert literature from the perspective of a jazz musician, it is flying objects in space that spring to mind. When exploring the work, he feels like a spaceship that is attracted to the moon - the work - and accelerates further as a result, and finally overcomes the gravitational forces through targeted counter-steering, shoots past it and can explore new worlds: worlds that lie beyond it. 

Haggai Cohen-Milo Volume X »Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune«

Classical vocal quartet, electric guitar and finger drumming? voiceXchange #10 invites you on January 17th: to groove along, feel along, dance along and immerse yourself in a rousing fusion of classical vocal sounds, soul and funk music.

voiceXchange #10: Funk & Soul

Gruenspan

Under the title THE ART OF, the solo evenings focus on experiencing the singing art of international exceptional figures in the opera world in its purest form and across the entire breadth of their repertoire. With THE ART OF, the Hamburg State Opera is continuing a long tradition: Luciano Pavarotti, José Carreras, Grace Bumbry, Montserrat Caballé and many others have already conquered the Hanseatic audience "single-handedly".

THE ART OF Lise Davidsen

With a chamber concert with a very similar line-up, I was able to experience the first time we made music together after the lockdown: a moment of great gratitude and heartfelt joy.

2nd Chamber Concert

After the young Polish pianist Szymon Nehring enjoyed a tremendous success last season with Mozart's "Jenamy" Concerto in E-flat major, he is now sitting at the grand piano in the Great Hall again with the first piano concerto in D minor, op. 15 by Johannes Brahms, who was about the same age at the time at just under 30.

"You see, this is a symphony theme," Anton Bruckner is said to have added to his overflowing quotation list after hearing the beginning of Brahms' concert colossus. But it was not only in Vienna that the strange hybrid work was met with scepticism. At the first performance in Leipzig at the Gewandhaus, the opus failed - "brilliantly and decisively" (Brahms). In 1860, a Hamburg critic spoke of a "symphony with obbligato piano." There were two shocks that the young Brahms was probably trying to process in his work: Schumann's suicide attempt in February 1854 and Beethoven's Ninth, which he had heard for the first time in his life. At the planned premiere of his concert in the Hamburg Musikverein, Brahms was denied the only playable grand piano. So he traveled with his work to Hanover for the premiere under the direction of his friend Joseph Joachim in January 1859.

Szymon Nehring with Brahms' Piano Concerto – Works by Debussy

"We are anchoring ourselves in music history and in life" - with this credo, the ensemble has developed offers for each program in the concert series Resonanzen, which invite all interested parties to new spaces of experience and adventure at the concerts. To do this, the musicians go to new places and open their doors to get in the mood for the concert together.

workshop »playground«

Ernie and Bert are back in the Elbphilharmonie: Together with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, the stars from Sesame Street will present a New Year's concert on January 19th with well-known melodies by Johannes Brahms and Johann Strauss.

NDR Family Concert: New Year's Concert with Ernie & Bert

The "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune" (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) is Claude Debussy's most popular and also his first important symphonic work. What's more, with its free form, which was completely innovative at the time, and its fascinating synthesis of nature experience and fantasy, it has become the key work of an entire era - "there is good reason to say that modern music awakens in Après-midi d'un faune," according to Pierre Boulez. It is based on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé published in 1876: With an enigmatic, overwhelming feeling of fleeting eroticism, a faun (half man, half goat) awakens in the idyllic Arcadia and, half-asleep, remembers flirting with and chasing two lovely nymphs. Both managed to escape him, however, before he went back to sleep. Debussy described it in a somewhat more prosaic way to a conductor who had asked for more detailed explanations: "It's about a shepherd who plays the flute while sitting with his bottom in the grass."

"Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune", "La Mer" and Dvořák's 8.

"We drop anchor in music history and in life" - with this credo, the ensemble has developed offers around each program of the concert series resonanzen, which invite all interested parties to the concerts in new spaces of experience and adventure. To do this, the musicians go to new places and open their doors to get in the mood for the concert together.

listening hour »playground«

»Man is only completely a man when he plays.« Friedrich Schiller already understood it, and Ensemble Resonanz and Patricia Kopatchinskaja provide the proof: they light-footedly dismantle their world, reassemble it and take their audience on a boundless adventure of discovery.

Events in Hamburg

flute, clarinet, bassoon ...

Symphoniker Hamburg

Der fliegende Holländer

Staatsoper Hamburg

Jonathan Bloxham & Karen ...

NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester

Die Zauberflöte (The Magi...

Staatsoper Hamburg

urban string »child of tr...

Ensemble Resonanz

horribly unreinforced: Ka...

NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester

Bruch Violin Concerto and...

Symphoniker Hamburg

5th Philharmonic Concert

Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg...

Classic Compact with Jona...

NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester

soloists from the orchest...

Symphoniker Hamburg

Haggai Cohen-Milo Volume ...

Symphoniker Hamburg

voiceXchange #10: Funk & ...

NDR Vokalensemble

THE ART OF Lise Davidsen

Staatsoper Hamburg

2nd Chamber Concert

Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg...

Szymon Nehring with Brahm...

Symphoniker Hamburg

workshop »playground«

Ensemble Resonanz

NDR Family Concert: New Y...

NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester

"Prélude à l'après-midi d...

Symphoniker Hamburg

listening hour »playgroun...

Ensemble Resonanz

resonances three »playgro...

Ensemble Resonanz