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1. December 2025

David Philip Hefti with the Stuttgart State Orchestra: Performances of Final(ment)e – Beziehungsweisen für zwei Trompeten und Orchester (December 2025)

On 7 and 8 December 2025, the Stuttgart State Orchestra will perform the work Final(ment)e – Beziehungsweisen für zwei Trompeten und Orchester by David Philip Hefti at the Liederhalle Stuttgart. The concert will be conducted by General Music Director Cornelius Meister.

The two soloists, Alexander Kirn and Lennard Czakaj – the principal trumpeters of the orchestra – will shape, together with the orchestra, a unique interplay of sound and spatial perception. Composed in 2021, this double concerto for trumpets explores themes of encounter, distance, and the search for connection. A continuous accelerando structures the work’s three parts, culminating in an emphatic finale. Through its spatial disposition of players, the piece deliberately embraces a certain degree of acoustic ambiguity – a key element of its dramaturgy and expressive force.

These performances promise an intense live experience in which music is not only heard, but also spatially felt – driven by the energy of the orchestra and the presence of the two soloists.

More information here

24. November 2025

Third philharmonic concert in Hamburg (November 2025)

“In the 3rd Philharmonic Concert, we encounter Gustav Mahler in the vocal interpretation by Annika Schlicht and Benjamin Appl. Ella Milch-Sheriff was inspired by some of his songs to create new compositions. “I have to find the right balance ,” she says of her work, “between my position as a 21st-century composer and the texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which come from a completely different era.”*** CHANGE NOTICE: The 3rd ZeitSpiel will be conducted by Keren Kagarlitsky, who is replacing Adam Fischer at short notice. Afterwards, the 3rd Philharmonic Concert will round off its song-like program—instead of the originally announced Concerto for Orchestra Sz 116 by Béla Bartók—with Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 in D minor, Op. 120.”

More information here.

6. October 2025

The new YouTube channel of the Richard Wagner Academy of the Dresden Music Festival (Oktober 2025)

The Richard Wagner Academy (RWA) of the Dresden Music Festival is pursuing its desire to continue the work of “The Wagner Cycles.” The ambitious goal of the project is the systematic reconstruction of Richard Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen” from the perspective and using the methods of historical performance practice. This field of work has given rise to workshops, publications, and much more, enabling the transfer of knowledge from musicology to practice. In the future, these offerings will also be made available to young musicians and the interested public.

Thematically sorted short videos and YouTube Shorts are intended to make the artistic and scientific processes even more visible – and to take all participants and interested parties on a journey with exclusive insights, rehearsal glimpses, concert impressions, and sound samples. Find the channel here.

3. October 2025

Kent Nagano conducts Wagner’s “Siegfried” as the third opera in “The Wagner Cycles” at the Lucerne Festival (September 2025)

On September 12, Kent Nagano presents Richard Wagner’s “Siegfried” together with the Dresden Festival Orchestra and Concerto Köln as part of “The Wagner Cycles” project.

What began in 2023 with a concert performance of “Rheingold,” continued in 2024 with “Die Walküre,” and now goes on with the development of “Siegfried,” can be considered a benchmark for Wagner interpretation. The Wagner Cycles project is dedicated to Richard Wagner’s monumental opera tetralogy in a unique combination of theoretical and practical approaches.

3. October 2025

Max Volbers at the Gewandhaus Leipzig (October 2025)

On October 4, 2025, Max Volbers performs at the Gewandhaus Leipzig together with the new Bach Collegium Musicum under the direction of Reinhard Goebel. Works by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Bieber, Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Philipp Telemann, and Johann Friedrich Fasch will be performed in the Mendelssohn Hall that evening.

Max Volbers and Reinhard Goebel have already collaborated on numerous projects, such as the performance of the Brandenburg Concertos at the 2019 Verbier Festival.

3. October 2025

Midori wins Cremona Music Award and Casals Prize (September/ October 2025)

Midori received the Cremona Music Award on September 26, and on October 5 she will be honored with the Casals Prize during a concert with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony in Kronberg.

The Cremona Musica Awards are being presented during the annual Cremona Musica Exhibitions and Festival to individuals and institutions from the music world who have achieved outstanding accomplishments in their field. The awards are divided into categories and include composition, performance, projects, and communication, among others.

The Casals Prize is intended to support and encourage artists to follow the example of Pablo Casals and thereby inspire future generations as role models.

3. October 2025

Festival “Drei Tage wach” – Omer Meir Wellber opens his first season as Hamburg’s General Music Director (September 2025)

From September 26 to 28, the Hamburg State Opera hosted the festival “Drei Tage wach,” with which Omer Meir Wellber as the new General Music Director and Tobias Kratzer as the new Artistic Director opened their first season.

The festival began on Friday with the Housewarming Concert, which covered all possible genres and eras.

On Saturday, under the motto “What opera can do,” Wellber and Kratzer’s first joint opera production followed—Robert Schumann’s opera “Das Paradies und die Peri” (Paradise and the Peri).

On the third day, “Generation Future,” the premiere of the children’s opera “Die Gänsemagd” (The Goose Girl) followed, as well as a presentation by the Hamburg Ballet.

3. October 2025

Max Volbers’ new Album “Bach vs. Scheibe“ (September 2025)

On September 5, Berlin Classics released Max Volbers’ latest album, “Bach vs. Scheibe,” featuring Concerto Köln and soprano Marie-Sophie Pollak, for which he is the artistic director.

In the album, the orchestra takes up a dispute that started in 1737 between Danish music critic Johann Adolf Scheibe and none other than Johann Sebastian Bach. In his magazine “Der Critische Musicus,” Scheibe called Bach’s compositions “confused and pompous.” Bach’s response was not long in coming, and so a dispute ensued that lasted for years.

Thus, this album not only contains the music of two contemporaries, but also shows the transition from the High Baroque to the Classical period and is an expression of an aesthetic generational conflict.

3. October 2025

Kent Nagano conducts Wagner’s “Siegfried” as the third opera in “The Wagner Cycles” at the Lucerne Festival (September 2025)

On September 12, Kent Nagano presents Richard Wagner’s “Siegfried” together with the Dresden Festival Orchestra and Concerto Köln as part of “The Wagner Cycles” project.

24. September 2025

New Transatlantic Music Project “Beyond the Atlantic” (September 2025)

The project Beyond the Atlantic, launched under the auspices of the Goethe-Institut Boston, aims to revitalize cultural dialogue between Europe and the United States in the field of contemporary concert music. The series brings together members of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Ecce Ensemble for discussions, workshops, and concerts focusing on aesthetic, political, and ecological issues. (beyondtheatlantic.org)

Swiss composer and conductor David Philip Hefti is one of the project’s co-founders and will take the podium at the closing concert on October 24, 2025 in Boston, by invitation of the Goethe-Institut. Performing under his direction will be members of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Ecce Ensemble. The program features the world premiere of Hefti’s new work Beyond Ashes alongside compositions by John Aylward, Martin Brody, Yu-Hui Chang, Isabel Mundry, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Beyond Ashes adopts the instrumentation of Schubert’s famous Trout Quintet—violin, viola, cello, double bass, and piano—yet Schubert’s music remains only as a distant echo. The piece unfolds from quiet, floating textures through an eruptive central section and ultimately into a final song-like farewell that dissolves into silence. Its title points beyond a purely narrative meaning: Beyond Ashes suggests not simply what follows destruction, but a transcendental space—an “elsewhere” beyond ashes and transience. With its combination of international collaboration, artistic depth, and new creation, Beyond the Atlantic promises to be an exciting contribution to today’s classical music scene—demonstrating how bridges between continents can be newly forged through music.

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