Musikfest Berlin 2025

The Berlin Music Festival is organized every year by the Berlin Festival in conjunction with the Foundation of the Berliner Philharmoniker. This year it is setting its sights on France, in part with the help of the Orchestre de Paris under Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. But the Big Band of the Deutsche Oper in Berlin will also be on hand to perform French jazz. The Berliner Philharmoniker themselves can be heard not only under their chief conductor Kirill Petrenko but also under François-Xavier Roth. Among their concerts will be a celebration of the centenary of the birth of Pierre Boulez.

A total of thirty events will be taking place between 30 August and 23 September 2025, their number divided between the Philharmonie and the Konzerthaus. Audiences will be able to hear more than eighty works by some fifty composers performed by twenty-six instrumental and vocal ensembles and forty-three soloists drawn from the world of international music as well as from Berlin itself. The focus of interest is France, which means that numerous visitors will be coming to Berlin from our neighbour to the West, while the repertory of works on offer ranges widely from French classics such as Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Debussy’s La Mer to milestones from the early modern period. Here the works of Pierre Boulez will have a prominent role to play in the form of a tribute to him on the centenary of his birth.

The Berliner Philharmoniker will be giving two concerts and they too will be celebrating Pierre Boulez, who made his conducting debut with the orchestra in 1961 and who by the 1990s was one of its most frequent guest conductors. The programme under François-Xavier Roth features Boulez’s Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna, a work in which the orchestra is divided into eight groups, taking full advantage of the spatial effects of which the Philharmonie is capable. The other work on this programme is the world premiere of Between Five Columns by Ondřej Adámek, a composer whose music draws on the most varied cultural influences to create a dialogue that spans the whole of the world.

The Berliner Philharmoniker’s second programme at the 2025 Berlin Music Festival will be conducted by Kirill Petrenko and includes Brahms’s First Symphony, a late Romantic work that is something of a fixture in the orchestra’s repertory. Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Oboe Concerto is the second piece on this programme and is an example of the rare combination of exuberant expression and modernism. Here, too, there is a French connection with Pascal Dusapin’s Exeo from 2002, a piece that is full of both contrasts and intricate details, at the heart of which is a force that slowly propels the work forwards, resulting in a truly remarkable experience for listeners.

As always, there is a good deal of contemporary music that audiences can discover at the 2025 Berlin Music Festival, with other anniversaries also being celebrated, including the centenaries of the birth of both Luciano Berio and Arvo Pärt and the ninetieth birthday of Helmut Lachenmann. Last but by no means least, the South Korean composer Younghi Pagh-Paan, who has been living in Germany for many years, is celebrating her eightieth birthday. Her music, which is marked by the spirituality of her Christian faith, will also feature on the programme.