On Monday 20 July at 8.00 pm, a free concert will kick off the National Day celebrations, in the presence of the King and Queen. This classical music concert is organised by the Queen Elisabeth Competition in collaboration with the Belgian National Orchestra, and with the support of the FPS Chancellery of the Prime Minister and the players of the National Lottery.

Prelude to the National Day 2026

Theater Saint-Michel

June 21 means Fête de la Musique! As every year, the BNO celebrates the end of the season with a free concert. This time with a twist: a concert-presentation giving you a first taste of the highlights of the 26/27 season.

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Fête de la Musique 2026

BOZAR

The Firebird was Stravinsky’s first ballet and launched him onto the international stage. A true revelation, particularly for its unprecedented orchestral colors, the ballet was later adapted into an orchestral suite. This suite has become a cornerstone of the symphonic repertoire, showcasing Stravinsky’s mastery, the virtuosity of each musician, and a sound that is both dynamic, evocative, and surprisingly accessible.

Vondráček plays Rachmaninov

Recognized as one of the most demanding and widely publicised international competitions, the Queen Elisabeth Competition has, ever since its founding in 1937, served as a springboard for young violinists, pianists, singers, and cellists at the dawn of their international careers. Above all, the Competition aims to build bridges between emerging virtuosos and the world’s leading concert stages. During the final week, candidates will perform a brand-new commissioned work, created especially for this edition, along with a concerto of their own choosing.

Queen Elisabeth Competition

This programme celebrates the lively, theatrical spirit of opera buffa through masterpieces by Mozart and Rossini. From Le nozze di Figaro to Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, Mozart displays unmatched dramatic finesse and musical richness, exploring themes of love, power, and desire. Rossini responds with the irresistible energy of Il barbiere di Siviglia, a pinnacle of virtuosity and humour. With the expressive voices of Lea Desandre and Huw Montague Rendall, this evening is a tribute to the elegance and wit of Italian opera.

Gala concert with Lea Desandre

Théâtre des Champs-Élysées

This vibrant program celebrates nature’s beauty and its profound impact on humanity. Czech composer Bedřich Smetana opens the evening with 'Vltava' from his symphonic poem Má vlast, a tribute to his Bohemian homeland. One of the most evocative pieces in the symphonic repertoire, it vividly depicts the flowing waters of the Moldau River.

Fazil Say’s Mother Earth

Grand Manège

Written in 1935, just before Prokofiev’s permanent return to the USSR, the Violin Concerto No. 2 signals a shift in his musical language: more stripped-down, more lyrical, yet still driven by his unmistakable rhythmic pulse. It begins with a disarmingly simple melody, opens into a slow movement of fragile sweetness, and culminates in a striking finale tinged with Spanish colour — a nod to the concerto’s Madrid premiere and to the European tour Prokofiev was undertaking at the time. With his distinctive sound, Nemanja Radulović brings these contrasts into sharp relief, revealing the quiet modernity of this pivotal work in Prokofiev’s career.

Radulović plays Prokofiev

Cultuurcentrum Hasselt

Cité de la Musique

In his first four symphonies, Gustav Mahler explores the human condition marked by powerlessness and injustice, expressing this through music tinged with sarcasm, mirroring the cultural tensions of fin-de-siècle Vienna. His Fifth Symphony, entirely instrumental, represents a stylistic and conceptual break: more virtuosic, polyphonic, introspective, and free from any explicit programme. Composed during a decisive summer in which he met Alma Schindler — believed to be the inspiration for the Adagietto — this five-movement work evolves from a funeral march to a triumphant finale. Following a Beethovenian model, Mahler crafts an inner narrative where man transcends earthly suffering to find spiritual redemption — a true musical ascent toward the light.

Mahler 5

Handelsbeurs Antwerpen

Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été, a song cycle set to poems by Théophile Gautier, is renowned as the first fully orchestrated French mélodie cycle. A master of orchestration and author of the Treatise on Instrumentation, Berlioz was one of the most influential figures in French orchestral writing. In this cycle, he employs a refined and restrained instrumentation, using each instrument sparingly to achieve maximum expressive effect.

UCLouvain

Discover a brand-new concert format, perfect for taking your first steps into the world of classical music. In just one hour, Thomas Vanderveken introduces you to a great symphonic masterpiece, revealing its secrets in a short and engaging introduction (in English, with surtitles in French and Dutch). For this edition, dive into Beethoven's beloved Pastoral Symphony.

Symphonic Date: Beethoven’s Pastoral

Three residents of the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel have the honour of performing for the first time with the Belgian National Orchestra. They will present the programme they have carefully prepared as part of their candidacy for the Queen Elisabeth Cello Competition in May and June. Take this opportunity to discover the talent of these promising artists and immerse yourself in the exceptional musical atmosphere of the Competition!

Cello Prelude - Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel

Wolubilis Theater

Few contemporary composers embody the symphonic tradition as fully as Belgian composer Luc Brewaeys. He began writing his Eighth Symphony in 2004, but the work remained unfinished at the time of his death in 2015. Inspired by another iconic “Eighth” — Beethoven’s — Brewaeys envisioned his own as a true “orgy of sound,” in his own words. True to his style, the orchestration is lush, imaginative, and delightfully unconventional… bottles included! His close collaborator and former student Annelies Van Parys took on the challenge of completing the symphony’s final movement, drawing inspiration from Brewaeys’ sketches and his distinctive musical style.

Beethoven’s Legacy

Among the leading figures of the Modern Classical movement are Ludovico Einaudi, Nils Frahm, and Max Richter. Richter’s musical language sits at the intersection of minimalism, European classical tradition, and electronic sounds. Deeply moved by the migration crises, he composed the mesmerizing Exiles in 2021. Contemplative and humanist, the work explores memory, the passage of time, and the experience of exile, gradually revealing the fragility of lives forced into displacement. The orchestral textures evoke the march of refugees and the fragile yet persistent hope for a better future.

Exiles | Max Richter

The Bozar organ was damaged by a fire in 2021. But that won't stop us! This exceptional concert with Thierry Escaich, organist at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, places innovation at the heart of its programme by broadcasting live from Bozar the great organ of the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula, featuring several breathtaking orchestral works. This concert is all the more symbolic as it takes place in the year of the 800th anniversary of Brussels' cathedral, an iconic monument of the city and the country.

Cathedral of Sound

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist garment factory in New York. The workers—mostly Jewish and Italian immigrant women and girls, aged 14 to 23—were unable to escape the flames: the factory doors had been locked to prevent them from taking unscheduled breaks.

Fire In My Mouth

This intense and moving programme features two of the most fascinating symphonic works of the 19th century. Harold in Italy, situated between a symphony and a concerto, unfolds as a poetic journey through the Abruzzo region of Italy, guided by the voice of the solo viola, performed by Antoine Tamestit. In this symphonic poem, Berlioz draws inspiration from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, capturing feelings of awe and contemplation in the face of nature, while giving the solo viola a central and multifaceted role.

Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique

In this concert of the Bartók Festival, three of the Hungarian composer’s most monumental works take center stage. Each of them reflects a distinct phase in Bartók’s remarkably rich artistic journey.

Bartók Festival – Masterworks

Lemmensinstituut, Luca School Of Arts

As part of his ongoing research into traditional music, Bartók gradually integrated the folk elements he discovered into his compositions. In the Six Romanian Folk Dances, he drew inspiration from melodies originating in Transylvania. Initially titled Hungarian Folk Dances, the work was renamed in 1920 following Transylvania’s integration into Romania.

Bartók Festival – Take nóta!

For one evening, percussion takes center stage with not one but two percussion concertos. Colin Currie shines in Julia Wolfe’s Body Language and Louis Andriessen’s Tapdance, moving between marimba, timpani, clapping, and a variety of other instruments. With striking rhythms and unexpected sonorities, these pieces offer a fresh perspective on the symphony orchestra.

Percussive Masterpieces

Philharmonic Hall of Liege

To kick off 2026 in style, conductor Tianyi Lu will lead the Belgian National Orchestra for a concert that is as festive as it is unexpected. Celebrate the New Year with a selection of dance-inspired works that cross continents with some of the greatest composers, including Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Piazzolla, and Price. Alongside the traditional Viennese waltzes, the virtuosity of Belgian accordionist Philippe Thuriot brings an unexpected twist to contemporary pieces, elevating them to the highest level.

New Year's Concert 2026

Centre Culturel et Sportif

Palais des Beaux Arts de Charleroi

Stadsschouwburg Leuven

De Spil

A three-time Grammy Award winner, Cécile McLorin Salvant is one of the most distinctive and versatile vocal artists of her generation. Her musical world—where jazz, chanson, folk, musical theatre and classical influences meet—finds a natural extension in the rich sound world of the symphony orchestra, whose expressive possibilities lie at the heart of this project. Far...

Cécile McLorin Salvant

Mozart thinks freely, Berlioz thinks theatrically, Beethoven thinks radically. They listened differently, thought further, and rewrote the rules of their time.

Eroica

As part of the Ars Musica festival, this programme (made up of four Belgian premieres) explores contemporary Nordic music in its most honest form: calm, focused and stripped of ornament. In Catamorphosis, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, our composer-in-residence, allows music to emerge from slow shifts and irreversible change. Sound becomes substance, shaped by tension and time.

Echoes of the North

What happens when music doesn’t aim to impress, but dares to feel? The great traditions fracture, making room for something rawer and deeply personal.

The Way to Expressionism

The Snowman (1982) tells the touching story of a boy who builds a snowman that comes to life during the night and takes him on a magical journey. In this special cine-concert, the animated film is screened while the music is performed live. The iconic song Walking in the Air, composed by Howard Blake in 198...

Winter Concert

The Belgian National Orchestra’s New Year concerts symbolise a festive tradition: music to raise a glass, welcome the year with a smile, and look ahead together. This time, the spotlight falls squarely on the trumpet, dazzling and irresistible.

New Year’s Glow 2027

Cultuurhuis De Warande

Contrast is the key to this concert. In his Third Piano Concerto, Beethoven places tension at the center: dark energy, sharp oppositions, and a piano part that does not embellish but speaks with urgency. Nikola Meeuwsen, winner of the 2025 Queen Elisabeth Competition, brings this work to life with striking clarity, a strong sense of drama...

Meeuwsen × Beethoven

“I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it”. With this striking statement, Igor Stravinsky captures the core of his art. His music is not meant to be analysed, but experienced — rhythmic, colourful, and unmistakably theatrical, deeply rooted in Russian folklore and imagination.

This is Stravinsky

In this chamber music concert, the musicians of the BNO take you on a journey through several decades of musical creation, revealing the many facets of Stravinsky’s art: always surprising and deeply innovative. Discover the masterful palette of sounds this legendary composer could create even with the smallest of instrumental ensembles, using instrumentation that is as...

This concert brings an intense Stravinsky weekend to a ceremonial climax. Funeral Song, the earliest surviving orchestral work by the composer, is a restrained tribute to his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov. The music unfolds like a shivering funeral procession: dark in colour, spare in gesture, yet charged with emotional intensity.

When orchestras come together, sparks fly. Invited to Bozar by the BNO, the Orchestre National de Lyon presents a powerful programme where storytelling and sound intertwine, and music becomes a shared experience.

Shostakovich & Mozart

With the Symphonie fantastique, Hector Berlioz created a work far ahead of its time. Rather than an abstract symphony, it is a musical vision. Berlioz tells the story of an artist, unmistakably his own alter ego, who encounters an idealised beloved and then spirals into a series of increasingly feverish dreams. What begins in longing and ecstasy unravels into obsession, slips into hallucination, and culminates in a frenzied witches’ sabbath.

Symphonic Date: Symphonie fantastique

Love as a driving force — and as a dangerous one: this is the central theme of this Friday Symphony. After a gentle, dreamlike lament by Paul Dukas, in homage to Debussy's genius, Camille Saint-Saëns’ Second Piano Concerto takes centre stage. Brilliant, sharp and playfully free, it lets the piano sparkle between virtuosity and irony. Pavel Kolesnikov, Bozar's portrait artist, shines in this work of elegant nervous energy and refined spontaneity.

Kolesnikov × Saint-Saëns

Het Perron Cultural Center

Some music seems to burst with energy before the first note has even settled. Sergei Prokofiev’s popular Third Piano Concerto is one such work. It sparkles and collides from every angle — sharp-edged yet irresistibly vibrant. Written between Russia, France and the United States, the concerto embodies a spirit of boundless freedom. As André Previn once remarked, it may well be the finest piano concerto of the post-Romantic era: fleet-fingered, unmistakably Russian, and extraordinarily demanding. The piano dances and provokes. The tone is light yet ironic — almost Mozartian in its clarity — but threaded with rhythmic tensions that grip and unsettle. With acclaimed soloist Alexander Gavrylyuk, this masterpiece finds an interpreter who combines power and precision, turning every motif into a surge of pure energy.

Gavrylyuk × Prokofiev

One of the leading voices of contemporary fado, Cristina Branco has developed a distinctive style that brings Portuguese tradition into dialogue with influences from jazz, chanson and contemporary music. Over three decades, she has created a unique and deeply expressive musical world while playing a key role in the renewal of fado.

Cristina Branco

What does it mean to feel at home when you leave? And what do you carry with you when you arrive? In Diaspora, Billy Childs creates a deeply evocative concerto in which the saxophone speaks as a travelling voice. Jazz, classical writing and personal history merge into music that moves between roots and open horizons. Steven Banks gives this voice warmth, nostalgia and a strong sense of individual presence.

From the New World

You can never hear too much Beethoven. In his Violin Concerto, he strikes a heroic tone: expansive in scale, open-minded in spirit, and carried by a deeply human idealism. Yet within these bold gestures lies a moment of complete stillness. The second movement unfolds like an elegy of rare beauty — intimate, consoling and endlessly singing. Daniel Lozakovich lets the violin speak with a natural intensity that never feels forced: clear in tone, warm at its core. It is no coincidence that soloists describe this concerto as a work they long to return to again and again. This music seems to transport you into another world.

Lozakovich × Beethoven

Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony is one of those rare works that seem to slow time almost to a standstill. Long, sustained lines unfold gradually, like breathing. Repetition becomes prayer. Simplicity becomes strength. In this “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” Górecki does not seek drama, but truth — a deeply human truth, expressed through spare orchestration, gentle textures and a voice that rises above everything while remaining profoundly inward. Here, emotion grows not from outburst, but from stillness and focus.

Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

Courtrai City Theater

Triangel

With The Unanswered Question, American composer Charles Ives places the listener inside an existential space. A simple, almost timeless question is posed again and again, while the attempted answers grow increasingly tense and desperate, until only silence remains. Music as thought, without resolution.

Schumann 2

City of Floating Sounds invites you to rediscover the city through an immersive sonic journey. Guided by a mobile app created especially for the project, you wander through the streets accompanied by fragments of Huang Ruo’s new symphony, before hearing the complete work performed live by the BNO.

City of Floating Sounds

De Singel

Two towering works confront darkness head-on. With his Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, Mozart composed one of his most intriguing and forward-looking creations. One of only two piano concertos in a minor key, it is also the most symphonic of them all. The tone is tense and shadowed, yet brilliantly conceived. Pierre-Laurent Aimard, internationally acclaimed for his advocacy of contemporary music and equally revered as a Mozart interpreter, returns here to familiar territory. Mozart, Aimard says, is a “delightful being”: curious, playful and endlessly rich. In this concerto, Aimard brings that complexity to life with clarity, restrained intensity and an impeccable sense of form.

Aimard × Mozart

A concerto without a soloist? Béla Bartók answered his critics with his Concerto for Orchestra. Every instrument, every section, has its moment to shine in music that is at once playful and powerful. Rhythm, colour, and vitality alternate in a continuous dialogue full of tension and magic. Written in exile, the piece is no resignation: it radiates resilience, alive and inventive down to the smallest detail. Under the baton of Michael Schønwandt, this masterpiece unfolds as a virtuosic display of collective strength, with the orchestra itself taking center stage.

Symphonic Date: Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra

The evening opens with Hector Berlioz’s Roman Carnival: brilliance, theatricality, and bubbling energy. The orchestra showcases playful colours and exuberant motion in a French celebration full of vitality and sparkle.

Berlioz & Bartók

Strauss, Ravel, and Sibelius fling open the windows on a hot summer night. What blows in is pure passion and irresistible local colour.

Ott × Ravel

Have you ever experienced a concert from the inside? As part of the Fête de la Musique, discover the BNO in a whole new way at the Ravenstein Gallery, with a free concert and an extraordinary musical experience.

Fête de la Musique 2027

Ravenstein Gallery

Arvo Pärt writes music that slows time down. A handful of notes, a triad left to resonate, a silence that carries as much weight as the sound itself. He called the style tintinnabuli, after the ringing of bells. That is how the jazz world came to know him too: in 1984, ECM launched its New Series with Tabula Rasa, featuring Keith Jarrett on piano in Fratres.

Belgian National Orchestra

Nov 19, 2026

Cécile McLorin Salvant

27 - 29 Nov, 2026

Eroica

Dec 4, 2026

Echoes of the North

Dec 11, 2026

The Way to Expressionism

Dec 19, 2026

Winter Concert

Jul 20, 2026

Prelude to the National Day 2026

Jun 21, 2026

Fête de la Musique 2026

Belgian National Orchestra