Musikfest Berlin 2026: Tickets for a selection of concert highlights released for sale
Musikfest Berlin opens the concert season by presenting international guest orchestras alongside Berlin’s great ensembles in a festival programme that this year forms part of the Berliner Festspiele’s 75th anniversary celebrations. The first concert highlights to be announced include performances by orchestras and choirs from the USA, South Africa, Finland, Great Britain, Spain, Switzerland, Austria and Germany.
Musikfest Berlin 2026 will present two concert performances of operas and a large-scale orchestral percussion ritual. For the opening on 28 August the anti-opera Le Grand Macabre by György Ligeti will be given a concert performance in the Philharmonie Berlin that will also be a celebration marking 75 years of the Berliner Festspiele, which were founded in 1951 as the Berliner Festwochen. Ligeti’s grotesque and humorous parable of war and the end of the world will be performed by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra with its chief conductor Nicholas Collon and the Helsinki Chamber Choir, shortly after its Finnish premiere at the Helsinki Festival.
Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin is regarded as an epoch-making work of music theatre and also possesses a politically significant performance history. It was given its world premiere in New York on Broadway in 1935, presented for the first time in Europe in Copenhagen in 1943 despite resistance from the Nazi occupying forces and finally made its German premiere on 17 September 1952 at the beginning of a world tour with a legendary cast in the second year of the new Berliner Festwochen, at a time when the leadership of the GDR introduced the first partitions between East and West Berlin. At Musikfest Berlin 2026, Porgy and Bess can be experienced in a new production by the Chineke! Orchestra from London with the Cape Town Opera Vocal Ensemble and a whole host of soloists conducted by Kwamé Ryan.
Following its performance at Musikfest Berlin 2016, 10 years later Wolfgang Rihm’s irrepressible Artaud ritual Tutuguri can be heard again at the Philharmonie Berlin, performed on this occasion by the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, with its Artistic Director Jörg Widmann conducting. This performance is dedicated to Wolfgang Rihm, who died in 2024 and played a key role in the Lucerne Festival Academy as its Artistic Director and in Musikfest Berlin with numerous performances of his works over many years.
To mark his centenary, the composer Hans Werner Henze, who was consistently associated with the Berliner Festspiele during his lifetime, will be commemorated with a performance of his hour-long piano concerto Tristan. Tamara Stefanovich is the soloist, accompanied by the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra conducted by Alan Gilbert, which will also bring Johannes Brahms’s First Symphony to Berlin for the orchestra’s debut at Musikfest Berlin.
The great composer Sofia Gubaidulina, acclaimed in both East and West, died in Hamburg in March 2025. The London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Antonio Pappano will offer a chance to hear her Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, together with Anton Bruckner’s 9th Symphony.
After its celebrated guest performance in 2024, the Wiener Philharmoniker Orchestra returns this time with Tugan Sokhiev conducting, performing Antonín Dvořák's Violin Concerto together with Hilary Hahn plus Sergei Prokofiev's ballet music Romeo and Juliet. Berlin audiences can also look forward to being reunited with the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra and its Music Director Matthias Pintscher, having frenetically applauded the orchestra’s festival debut in 2024. Its programme features two orchestral pieces by the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, along with Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto with the Canadian violinist Blake Pouliot as the soloist and Rachmaninoff’s 3rd Symphony.
Two ensembles specialising in historically informed performance practice present guest performances this year of the romantic repertoire: the Freiburger Barockorchester performs the music of Robert Schumann, with Sir Simon Rattle as the conductor and violinist Isabelle Faust as the soloist – a premiere of this combination at the Philharmonie Berlin. Meanwhile the Ensemble Le Concert des Nations will visit from Catalonia with its founder and director Jordi Savall. Following a homage to Jordi Savall as a visionary of historically informed performance practice by the Berliner Philharmoniker in the 25/26 season, they will present a pure Mendelssohn programme, with the Hebrides Overture and both his “Scottish” and “Italian” Symphonies. Kent Nagano will interpret Mendelssohn’s “Reformation Symphony” in his concert with the WDR Sinfonieorchester – and will also bring a musical sensation along with him: an orchestral work by the composer and pianist Yvonne Loriod, which Nagano discovered together with other orchestral compositions by his former teacher in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and has now brought to life. La Sainte Face (The Holy Face) for soprano and orchestra will be a world premiere at Musikfest Berlin with Sarah Aristidou as the soloist, over 80 years after it was written.
Musikfest Berlin 2026
From 28 August to 23 September
At the Philharmonie Berlin, its Chamber Music Hall, and other venues
Full programme announced on 21 April 2026
Starting 4 December 2025, there will be an early booking offer, valid until 31 January 2026: A 20 % discount is applied to each ticket when buying tickets for five or more concerts in a single purchase.
Musikfest Berlin is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
In cooperation with the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation.
Media partners: radio3 vom rbb, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, arte, Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Monopol – Magazin für Kunst und Leben, Tagesspiegel, Wall and Yorck Kinogruppe.