This season, the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg invites music lovers to a symphonic journey filled with groundbreaking premieres, historical masterpieces, and innovative collaborations. From the world premiere of Jörg Widmann's 'Cantata in tempore belli' to the deep emotions of Brahms and the scientific explorations in the themed concerts, each event showcases a unique blend of artistry and creativity. Join us as we explore the details of these captivating concerts and the talented artists who bring them to life.

Harmonious Journeys: Exploring Hamburg's Philharmonic and Chamber Concerts

Dive into the world of orchestral and chamber music with Hamburg's Philharmonisches Staatsorchester this spring. From the enchanting melodies of Ravel's 'Daphnis et Chloé' to the innovative 'Science Slam' at the Theme Concerts, these events promise an exciting musical journey. Experience performances by renowned conductors like Thomas Guggeis and James Conlon, along with talented young musicians from the Orchestra Academy. Join us at the iconic Elbphilharmonie for a celebration of music that bridges the past and future.

A Symphony of Talent: Exploring Hamburg's Upcoming Concerts

Hamburg's vibrant musical scene is set to captivate audiences with a series of diverse and exhilarating concerts. From the forward-thinking '3rd Theme Concert' with a focus on the future of music and science, to the introspective chamber concerts and grand orchestral performances featuring works by iconic composers, the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg promises an unforgettable experience. These events bring together renowned conductors, talented performers, and groundbreaking compositions, making the city a cultural hub for music lovers worldwide.

Orchestral Wonders and Artistic Journeys in Hamburg's Musical Scene

Hamburg is set to resonate with the harmonies of history and innovation in a series of captivating concerts this year. From the orchestral genius of Dvořák and Martinů to the chamber intricacies of Schubert and Wolf, the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg curates an eclectic lineup. With maestros like Kent Nagano and James Conlon at the helm, these events promise to explore the profound depths of musical art. As we delve into the nuances of these performances, each concert offers a tapestry of emotions, examining the past, redefining the present, and imagining the future of music.

A Symphony of Time: Exploring Hamburg's Musical Landscape

I have played "Death and the Maiden" with my siblings since childhood, naively and full of joy. Today with the certainty and knowledge that Schubert's music reflects everything without words: despair, fear, gentleness and consolation.

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5th Chamber Concert

Elbphilharmonie Hamburg

In these concerts, THE Czech composer of the 19th century meets THE Czech composer of the 20th: we are talking about Antonín Dvořák and Bohuslav Martinů.

8th Philharmonic Concert

This season, the Philharmonic State Orchestra's Music and Science series is celebrating its 10th anniversary. A reason to look ahead! To the future, to what science and music will have to say in 2025. As a new cooperation partner on the path to unlimited possibilities, we welcome "Science Slam", who are experts in bringing the latest research findings to the stage in a short, crisp and scientifically correct manner. In order to convey the message in an understandable and entertaining way, all aids are permitted.

3rd Theme Concert

Stockmeyerstraße 43/Hall 424

Giacomo Puccini stands for grand opera and grand emotions. It is not widely known that the composer devoted himself to chamber music alongside his rich operatic output, and even tried out the "grand" form in it. Most of his works were written during his time as a student in Milan as a testament to his love of experimentation - including his Tre minuetti. From Italy he traveled to Japan with Toshio Hosokawa: he draws his inspiration from the connection between nature and man. Similar to the art of Japanese calligraphy, he sets note after note like a brushstroke, creating the most beautiful sound paintings. Camille Saint-Saëns was also an artist of timbres: his fantasy for harp and violin represents the gesture of French music par excellence - lightness and elegance meet clarity and haunting charm. Ludwig van Beethoven was by no means light-hearted when he set about writing his String Quartet in E flat major. A few months earlier, the Battle of Aspern, one of the bloodiest massacres of the Napoleonic Wars, had raged outside the gates of Vienna. A faint hope arose because Napoleon was unable to achieve a clear victory. The composer put some of this hope in the face of brooding melancholy into his music.

4th Chamber Concert

2nd Theme Concert

Resonance Chamber

The Orchestra Academy of the Philharmonic State Orchestra prepares highly talented young instrumentalists for a career as professional musicians in a large international orchestra. The 15 academy students are part of the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra for two years. At their annual chamber concert, the stage belongs to them alone for one evening: sometimes in classical, sometimes in unusual formations, they present their skills in the Recital Hall of the Elbphilharmonie.

Chamber Concert of the Orchestra Academy

Dance, language and fantastic images: the three orchestral works in this concert programme contain a great deal of creative energy. Ravel wrote "Daphnis et Chloé" as ballet music for Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes. However, the composition initially enjoyed great success as suites on the concert stage, where its genius comes into its own. Ravel had a "great musical fresco" in mind for the ancient love story of the two foundlings, "less concerned with archaism than with loyalty to the Greece of my dreams". In outstanding colours, he pours the rising sun, the song of the nymph and an ecstatic final frenzy into a painting from the early 20th century.

7th Philharmonic Concert

Ten years of music & science, ten years of two in one: chamber concerts and lectures are closely linked in the themed concerts. This season, the anniversary provides an opportunity for an innovation - for the first time, the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra is cooperating with "Science Slam". For the three dates in February and March 2025, the speakers will come from the ranks of the entertaining institution that has been bringing new research knowledge to young people's evening or even nighttime stages in Hamburg in an understandable and appealing way since 2009. You can therefore expect amusing speakers who are very familiar with bringing the latest research findings to the stage in a short, crisp and scientifically correct way. In order to convey the message in an understandable and entertaining way, all aids are permitted.

1st Theme Concert

The works of the 3rd Chamber Concerto are all about love and solidarity in word and sound: When Johannes Brahms set about composing the “Two Songs”, it was his close friendship with his long-time companion, the violinist Joseph Joachim. Brahms wanted to create a musical monument to his love and composed the “Spiritual Lullaby” based on a text by Emanuel Geibel for his wedding, but withdrew the composition and revised it. The composer then published both songs together with “Quenched Longing” based on a text by Friedrich Rückert to mark another happy event: the baptism of his godchild, Joseph Joachim’s son. In both compositions, one can hear the unbridled joy of life, born of love. Leoš Janáček's (late) love for Kamilla Stösslová, who was almost 40 years younger than him, was, however, under a completely different, much worse star. In his second string quartet, with the programmatic nickname "Intimate Letters", his feelings for the young woman are omnipresent. Just a year before his death, Janáček left behind the frivolous testimony of a great love: eruptive, provocative and passionate.

3rd Chamber Concert

The 6th Philharmonic Concert will feature a world premiere reflecting our times. Jörg Widmann, who has been in close artistic contact with Kent Nagano, especially since the great success of his ARCHE for the opening of the Elbphilharmonie, recently wrote a decidedly peace-loving work in view of the global wars: "Cantata in tempore belli". Jens Harzer takes on the role of the speaker. Ida Aldrian sings the alto part.

6th Philharmonic Concert

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

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

What kind of woman is she? The former professional tennis player Marie Jacquot seems to have been taking the stage by storm for several years. Since the 2023/24 season, the Frenchwoman has been principal guest conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, and from the 2024/25 season she will also take on the role of chief conductor of the Royal Danish Theatre Copenhagen. And for the 2026/27 season she will become chief conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra. Here the hackneyed phrase becomes true: we will be hearing a lot more from her.

4th Philharmonic Concert

The Philharmonic State Orchestra, from whose ranks the ensembles for six chamber concerts are formed until the summer, spends most of its time in the pit: at the interface between the singing on stage and the music from below. The fact that text and instrumental sound usually go together extraordinarily well is therefore in the orchestra's blood. For an entire season, the interaction of text and music will also be examined in an intimate chamber music setting. How fitting that many members of the State Opera ensemble could be won over for the series. The Hamburg chamber singer Gabriele Rossmanith will be the first to perform.

1st Chamber Concert

"The success was tremendous and unprecedented! Critics, artists, amateurs and music lovers were intoxicated ... The auditorium roared apart, loudly proclaiming the new miracle." Thus a report on the premiere in 1821 at the Berlin Schauspielhaus. Der Freischütz struck a chord with the times, every barrel organ played the "Jungfernkranz", every street singer performed it, as Heine reports. Weber had discovered the material in an old ghost book. The story of the hunter Max, who devotes himself to the devil in order to win his bride, touches on people's primal fears. The forest, the epitome of the "German soul", becomes a battleground between good and evil. Weber's music depicts the plight and despair of the people with gripping emotionality; the hope of a happy ending is evoked with fervor. Romantic drama and folk play in one, Der Freischütz is set somewhere between dream and nightmare, fascinating to this day.

Der Freischütz

Staatsoper Hamburg

When, at some point towards the end of Helmut Lachenmann's "Dance Suite with German Song" (1980), Haydn's Kaiser Quartet is actually quoted or at least alluded to, it is already clear that no anthem is to be sung along to. And there can be no talk of dancing in this piece by one of the key composers of the past decades. In this provocative work, which was of course premiered in Donaueschingen and is performed here with the help of the sensational Quatuor Diotima String Quartet from Paris, Lachenmann was concerned with noises, with breaks, with the question of what a note actually is.

3rd Philharmonic Concert

With conductor Andrey Boreyko we turn our ears to the East. With his fantastic Scherzo, the Czech Josef Suk, student and son-in-law of Antonín Dvořák, created an orchestral work that is particularly lively - and in no way inferior in expressiveness to the following Divertimento from Stravinsky's ballet "The Kiss of the Fairy".

2nd Philharmonic Concert

Friedrich-Ebert-Gymnasium

Gustav Mahler's development and work as a composer focused primarily on two musical genres: symphony and song. Time and again, the two very different forms came closer together, but the connection between the monumentality of the symphony and the intimacy of the song reached a hymnic climax in "Das Lied von der Erde". A compositional legacy based on texts by Hans Bethge that Mahler left to the world, knowing full well that his own death was already waiting for him around the next corner. For the concerts of the "Association for Private Musical Performances", Arnold Schönberg arranged Mahler's final song for a chamber orchestra, a work that was finally completed by Rainer Riehn. The arrangement for chamber orchestra made Mahler's composition a masterpiece of its own kind, in which the essence of the original sound is preserved through careful reduction and transforms into a new quality of characteristics and emotional experience.

Special chamber concert

The 2024/25 season, the last with General Music Director Kent Nagano, starts with Anton Bruckner's Ninth - one of the many ninth and final symphonies in music history. How far the old believer looked ahead to what was to come at the end of the 19th century is still impressive and deeply moving. A symphony for eternity. One that will continue almost indefinitely.

1st Philharmonic Concert

The fundamentally humanistic sound ideal of Johann Sebastian Bach and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach meets the youthful romantic gesture of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: The 4th Academy Concert continues the series of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos that began in the 1st Academy Concert. Music that is so popular and admired that in 1977 it flew through space on a data disk on board the "Voyager 2" space probe - and is now back in Hamburg. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach does not have to hide from the overwhelming legacy of his famous father, as shown by his Symphony No. 6, nicknamed "Hamburger". A piece of breathtaking tension with rich timbres and a humorous wink. The latter Bach served as a role model for another composer, namely Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. The "Youth Symphony" by the twelve-year-old already gives an idea of ​​the composer's great visionary potential.

4th Academy Concert

In the 3rd Academy Concert, two world premieres meet a familiar face: Stefan Schäfer, solo double bassist of the Philharmonic State Orchestra, passionate chamber musician and composer, starts off. His "Reflections on a Good Morrow" is a commissioned work by the Philharmonic State Orchestra. The new is followed by the familiar: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his "Nachtmusique". A demanding work with which Mozart - once again - exceeded the expectations of his time and composed chamber music with an almost symphonic gesture. Fabian Otten shows how much one's own music-making and composing benefit from each other, and can even be mutually dependent. The first percussionist and timpanist of the Philharmonic State Orchestra has been studying the Master's program in composition at the HfMT Hamburg since 2022 and is composing a commissioned work for string quintet and percussion for this concert. The musical final word again belongs to Mozart, whose string quintets were considered by Franz Schubert to be "beneficial departures from a brighter, better life" and by modern musicology to be "his greatest achievement in chamber music" (Charles Rosen). His String Quintet in G minor represents Mozart's very own musical language and the purity and beauty of the artistic form.

3rd Academy Concert

The first Academy Concert, which is given in three (slightly) different programs, is all about Hamburg: The Philharmonic State Orchestra plays under the direction of chief conductor Kent Nagano and together with various choirs from the Hanseatic city. With Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven (Programs I+III), Johannes Brahms and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Program II), four great masters of music history pass the musical pen to each other. As different as the times and eras in which they worked were, they are nevertheless united by great virtuosity, contrasting expressive qualities and the constant search, discovery and reinvention of their own musical language. With three slightly changing programs, four musical languages ​​that are equally different and genius are making their way into the Great Hall of the Elbphilharmonie.

1st Academy Concert - Program III

1st Academy Concert - Program II

In the second academy concert, old and new are combined, the familiar with the unknown and the fairytale-like, when the forward-moving, youthful freshness of the seventeen-year-old Mozart meets the rather unknown romantic sounds of the Hamburg-born Ferdinand David. The atmosphere continues with Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose music is a sonorous reflection of their origins and homeland, England. Just like Edvard Grieg's "Peer Gynt" from Norway. A fairytale ending to a concert between Hamburg, Vienna, England and Poland, between classical, romantic and modern.

2nd Academy Concert

1st Academy Concert - Program I

In the heart of Hamburg: a warm late summer night, hustle and bustle, conviviality and brilliant sounds in the open air - chief conductor Kent Nagano, the Philharmonic State Orchestra and the Hamburg State Opera have once again brought a special gift to their loyal audience this year. With powerful choirs, rousing rhythms and beautiful melodies: with Carl Orff's cantata "Carmina Burana", the orchestra, together with the choir of the Hamburg State Opera and the Hamburg Boys' Choir, are bringing one of the most popular musical creations ever to the Rathausmarkt. "O Fortuna, your moods change like the image of the moon," is how the opening chorus first addresses the goddess of fate, before moving on in several stages through the different stages of human life. The wheel of fate rolls relentlessly between joy and sorrow, love and consolation, telling of the autumn of one's own existence and yet offering the decisive hope: that a new spring will come - O, Fortuna!

Rathausmarkt Open Air

Pierre Boulez's "Répons" was one of the notable highlights of Kent Nagano's "Philharmonic Academy" in St. Michaelis at the beginning of his tenure in Hamburg. He artfully staged the "exchange" between chamber ensemble and soloists as well as between electronically distorted and unaltered sounds in the hallowed halls of the Michel. The major "Elbphilharmonie" project was still a construction site at the time. Ten years later, Nagano is taking up this exceptional work by the composer, conductor and founder of the Paris IRCAM Institute again and bringing it to our new and yet already firmly established concert hall on the Elbe.

Opening Concert of the International Music Festival Hamburg

Making music together in the Amaris Quartet is like a refreshing breath of air for my artistic work in the orchestra. These concerts are without doubt the most musically gratifying moments that I am allowed to experience as a musician. They sharpen my hearing and subtly inspire my love of music.

6th Chamber Concert

The musical portrait of this concert is dedicated to Richard Strauss – a celebrated composer, politically controversial cultural figure and undoubtedly an artist who was ahead of his time. Confidants described him as a humorous person who never let fame go to his head. His love was music, his family and playing cards (he was even said to have been a good loser). He began composing at the age of six. He reached the first high point of his instrumentation skills with his famous tone poem “A Hero’s Life”. Critics accused him of shameless self-glorification in this work, but Strauss said: “I am no hero. I lack the necessary strength; I am not made for battle; I prefer to withdraw, to enjoy peace and quiet…” If you want to look for autobiographical elements in his work, it is worth taking a look at the “Four Last Songs”, which reflect his exploration of the themes of death and farewell – an artistic legacy; a farewell to this world.

9th Philharmonic Concert

Why are we here? Are we loved? Have children someday? Graduate from school? And will there still be someone to remember us in 100 years' time? A group of young people looking for their way through perhaps the hardest time of their lives. Driven by the feeling of loneliness and the longing for closeness, by ignorance and boundless curiosity, by pressure to perform and sheer despair, they struggle through the school year: Moritz, Melchior, Wendla and their classmates. They experience violence, abuse, death and a small spark of hope for all the survivors (perhaps also the dead). Wedekind's drama is more than a coming-of-age drama, it is a reckoning with the society of its time, an unsparing story that has lost none of its revolutionary power to this day and will be unleashed in a new and contemporary way through music in this world premiere.

Frühlings Erwachen

Kampnagel

In this concert, which concludes Kent Nagano's ten-year term as General Music Director, two key strands of his concert dramaturgy for Hamburg come together: the reference to tradition, namely to the Hanseatic Johannes Brahms, whose four symphonies the Philharmonic has accompanied in recent years in its Hamburg concerts as well as on tours - and the sound of our present in innovative premieres. A look back makes us think of Widmann's ARCHE, Dusapin's "Waves", Shepherd's "On a Clear Day" and many other outstanding new creations. In this concert - as both a crowning finale and farewell - a new symphony by the young Argentinian Alex Nante will be heard in his unmistakably dreamlike, spiritual sound language.

Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg

1 - 2 May, 2025

Opening Concert of the International Music Festival Hamburg

May 11, 2025

6th Chamber Concert

1 - 2 Jun, 2025

9th Philharmonic Concert

19 - 22 Jun, 2025

Frühlings Erwachen

29 - 30 Jun, 2025

10th Philharmonic Concert

Apr 13, 2025

5th Chamber Concert

6 - 7 Apr, 2025

8th Philharmonic Concert

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