Musikfest Berlin opens on 30 August at Philharmonie Berlin

On 30 August, Musikfest Berlin 2025 opens with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and conductor Klaus Mäkelä. Until 23 September, the Berliner Festspiele’s international festival of orchestral music – in co-operation with the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation – will invite to over 30 concerts in the Philharmonie Berlin, the Chamber Music Hall and Konzerthaus Berlin.

Renowned ensembles from Paris, Rome, London, Ghent, the Netherlands, Sweden, South Korea and Ukraine will be performing. Composers such as Helmut Lachenmann, Younghi Pagh-Paan, Robin de Raaff and Lisa Streich will attend. With more than 120 works by some 70 composers, the festival presents music stretching from the Italian Renaissance through the classical and romantic orchestral repertoire to 20th century modernism and beyond, right up to the latest compositions of our own time. The 100th birthdays of Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio will be celebrated, Lachenmann will be honoured with five concerts for his 90th birthday. Younghi Pagh-Paan and Arvo Pärt will be celebrated on their anniversaries in concerts by the Busan Philharmonic Orchestra and the RIAS Kammerchor Berlin.

On the opening weekend, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir are performing. From Paris five ensembles are coming, among them the Orchestre de Paris with Esa-Pekka Salonen, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and Les Siècles with Isabelle Faust and Sarah Aristidou. The Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia present works by Berio with Daniel Harding and Magdalena Kožená.

Chamber music concerts with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the Senza Sforzando ensemble from Odessa and the concert world premiere of the Bauhaus opera “Parabola and Circula” by Marc Blitzstein enrich the programme.

Fourteen concerts will be recorded by rbb and Deutschlandfunk Kultur, four of which will be broadcast live.