Kirill Petrenko and the 2025/26 season

Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” is a colossus – not just musically, but also in terms of its ideas and conception. Mahler described it as “like the whole universe starting to ring and reverberate”. Chief conductor Kirill Petrenko is also embarking on another large-scale musical project: with Wagner’s Das Rheingold, he will lay the foundations for a complete performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Stories told through the medium of music are generally at the heart of his work, also illustrated this season through the ballet music of Stravinsky, Bartók, and Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. The core of the orchestra’s repertoire is represented by music by Brahms and Beethoven.

The range of works that Kirill Petrenko will be conducting at his concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2025/26 is vast, extending from Viennese Classicism to the music of the twenty-first century, from a solo concerto to a ballet suite and from a German music drama to Italian opera arias. As the orchestra’s chief conductor, he will also be advancing further into the areas that he has been gradually opening up since he and the orchestra embarked on their journey together. He views the music of German and Austrian Classical and Romantic composers as part of the orchestra’s DNA, forming the core of their repertoire. In the new season, this tradition will be represented by works such as Beethoven’s Second Symphony, Brahms’s First and Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand”, a work that is an oratorio which also marks the culmination of the symphony’s development as a genre.

A second aspect of Kirill Petrenko’s repertoire choices is the world of Slavic culture: this is music that has always been close to his heart. Czech music can be heard in Leoš Janáček's exhilarating Lachian Dances, Russian music in Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations and Romeo and Juliet as well as in Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Pulcinella and by Scriabin’s Third Symphony, also known as Le divin poème. But Kirill Petrenko is also interested in composers who have been unjustly neglected as a result of war or political circumstances. They include Bernd Alois Zimmermann, whose exuberant early Oboe Concerto he will conduct, with Albrecht Mayer as the soloist. Recent music will be represented by Pascal Dusapin’s Exeo, the title that the French composer has given to his Fifth Solo for Orchestra, which Kirill Petrenko describes as “both powerful and wonderfully beautiful”.

In all of the works he conducts, Kirill Petrenko finds a unifying motivation: “Every work of music has a message that relates it to the outside world,” he explains. This is true not only of symphonic poems that have a clearly stated programme, but also of symphonies that may initially appear to be examples of “absolute music”. During the 2025/26 season Kirill Petrenko, will conduct many works with an underlying narrative. These include not only ballets by Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky’s overture-fantasy Romeo and Juliet (mentioned above), but also the Suite from Béla Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin, alongside Ottorino Respighi's musical portraits of the pines and famous fountains of Rome. With Das Rheingold, which Wagner himself called the “preliminary evening” of his Ring cycle, Kirill Petrenko and his orchestra will celebrate their return to the Salzburg Easter Festival, while also continuing a much-loved tradition by bringing a concert performance of the work home to the ideal acoustics of Berlin's Philharmonie.