Hamburg International Music Festival

Programme highlights to close the season: in this edition of the five-week festival, the great Hamburg orchestras and star guests explore the motto »The End«

Description

Every year, the Hamburg International Music Festival Hamburg celebrates the spectacular close of the season with a month-long series of special concerts. Star performers and audience favourites take the stage in quick succession – this year, including Janine Jansen, Christian Tetzlaff, Daniil Trifonov and Arcadi Volodos. As always, the programme weaves in thematic strands and dedicated series. One focus this year is the composer Hans Werner Henze , whose sensuous soundscape is brought into the spotlight on the occasion of his 100th birthday. The festival also honours the 100th anniversary of Miles Davis’s birth – five concerts explore how the most influential jazz musician of the 20th century revolutionised the genre.

Hamburg’s new General Music Director Omer Meir Wellber continues the festival’s tradition of extraordinary productions with a semi-staged performance of Leonard Bernstein’s »Mass« – a work that transforms a church service into a civil rights demonstration. His predecessor Kent Nagano conducts Richard Wagner’s »Götterdämmerung« in a historically informed interpretation, following on from his acclaimed »Walküre« at the 2024 festival. Other highlights include a staged homage to the cult film »La Grande Bouffe« and music by Gustav Mahler accompanied by circus acrobats.

This year’s festival theme is »The End« – inspired by Hermann Hesse’s famous line: »Every end is also a beginning«. Ever since humanity has contemplated space and time, it has been fascinated by endings – of journeys, of lives, of the world. Can we foresee them? How will they turn out? And what comes after? The festival’s programme brings together music of all genres and eras that offer their own unique answers to these timeless questions.

The opening concert features the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra performing Franz Schmidt’s lavish oratorio »The Book with Seven Seals«, a vivid musical portrayal of the biblical apocalypse. The festival concludes with the Staatskapelle Dresden performing Verdi’s highly dramatic Requiem, featuring a star-studded cast led by soprano Elīna Garanča. Meanwhile, the three-part concert series »Lost Music« shines a light on endangered musical traditions from Crimea, Lebanon and Afghanistan – musical cultures currently at risk of disappearing due to political or religious suppression.

Supported by Stiftung Elbphilharmonie and the Förderkreis Internationales Musikfest Hamburg

Events of the festival

Supporting Programme

  • Kühne Stiftung Logo
  • Julius Bär Logo