Elbphilharmonie publishes its concert season 2023/24

Hamburg, 23 May 2023: On Tuesday, the Elbphilharmonie presented its programme for the 2023/24 season. Once again this season, some of the biggest names of the classical music world will be performing in Hamburg, including renowned orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Audience favourites such as Yuja Wang, Sir Simon Rattle, Lisa Batiashvili, Klaus Mäkelä, Daniil Trifonov, Teodor Currentzis, Janine Jansen and Sir John Eliot Gardiner will be returning to the stage. For the season’s opening concert on 5 September, the Teatro alla Scala Choir and Orchestra from Milan perform a Verdi programme under Riccardo Chailly. Other notable concerts include performances by the British singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, the five-time Grammy Award-winner esperanza spalding, the Brazilian legend Caetano Veloso and the recent Pulitzer Prize-recipient Rhiannon Giddens. Spotlight series are dedicated to the renowned pianist Sir András Schiff, the award-winning, Berlin-based British composer Rebecca Saunders, and the music of Kurdistan. American jazz guitarist Bill Frisell hosts a multi-day »Elbphilharmonie Reflektor« festival, and the exceptional artist André Heller will be curating an entire week at the iconic concert venue in the Port of Hamburg. The Elbphilharmonie will be marking Luigi Nono’s 100th birthday in March 2024. Programme highlights include numerous operatic performances, including the German premiere of György Kurtág’s only opera »Fin de partie«, a historically informed »Carmen« with René Jacobs, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s monumental epic »Die Soldaten«. Offenbach’s delightful »Orpheus in the Underworld« can be heard on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Subscriptions for the 2023/24 season are available now at www.elbphilharmonie.de, and tickets for individual concerts can be purchased for most events from 6 June.

Following on directly from Elbphilharmonie Summer, the Elbphilharmonie programme boasts outstanding quality and diversity right from the first week of the season. After the opening concerts of the Hamburg orchestras and the season opener with the Milan Scala under Riccardo Chailly on 5 September, there are two concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelsons (6/7 Sep) and two concerts with François-Xavier Roth and his original-sound orchestra Les Siècles (26/27 Sep). The Bavarian State Orchestra is coming to Hamburg with »An Alpine Symphony« to celebrate its 500th anniversary, Iván Fischer presents a semi-staged production of Claude Debussy’s »Pelléas et Mélisande« with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, and Teodor Currentzis conducts Shostakovich’s 13th with the SWR Symphonieorchester. Beyond classical music, the Elbphilharmonie also welcomes Elvis Costello (19 Sep) and Caetano Veloso (4 Oct), as well as the Italo-jazz legend Enrico Rava with Fred Hersch (25 Sep) and Oumou Sangaré fron Mali (31 Oct). A whole host of top ECM artists join forces to wish label founder Manfred Eicher a happy milestone birthday (29 Sep).

Over the coming season, Sir András Schiff will be demonstrating his artistic versatility in a series of concerts – with works by Bach, Mozart, Dvořák, Brahms and others; and that as a soloist with major orchestras, in the recital format, as a chamber musician and, of course, as an ensemble conductor. He begins by offering aspiring musical talents a platform through his mentoring programme »Building Bridges« (9 Jan). Jakub Hrůša has already given debuts with all of the world’s most important orchestras, and he will be assuming the post of music director of the Royal Opera House in London in 2025. Hamburg audiences will have five opportunities to see him at work over the coming season. Thomas Hengelbrock is intensifying his work with his Balthasar Neumann Ensembles on the Elbphilharmonie and Laeiszhalle podiums. In addition to sacred works for choir and orchestra, including Johannes Brahms’s »German Requiem« (17 Feb) and Mendelssohn’s »Lobgesang« (18 Feb), the programme also features a weighty opera in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s »Iphigénie en Tauride« (24 May). Other leading interpreters such as John Eliot Gardiner, Jordi Savall, François-Xavier Roth, Raphaël Pichon, René Jacobs and Philipp Herreweghe all conduct concerts with the original-sound orchestras they founded.

The Elbphilharmonie has invited two outstanding artists to curate a multi-day »Reflektor« festival. US jazz guitarist Bill Frisell will be appearing as an improvising chamber musician in small line-ups (25–26 Nov). For the New York Times, Frisell is the »most significant and widely imitated guitarist to emerge in jazz since the beginning of the 1980s«. André Heller occupies a singular position in the contemporary art landscape, and can look back at a 60-year career as a chansonnier, poet, theatre-maker, exhibition organiser, director, painter and multi-media artist. ANIMA is a fantastic garden created by Heller outside the gates of Marrakech, and it is also the name of his Elbphilharmonie project. For one whole week, the Elbphilharmonie will become the site for Heller’s sensory explorations – programme details will be published at a later time (16–24 Mar).

Pioneering music and transdisciplinary productions have always enjoyed a strong platform in the Elbphilharmonie. In 2019, Rebecca Saunders became the first female composer to win the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize – the unofficial Nobel Prize of music. Five concerts will offer an opportunity to gain insights into her creative development over the last ten years. The performance of her work »Yes«, which is based on James Joyce’s »Ulysses« (24 Nov) will be occupying the entire hall. With Sasha Waltz (7 Jan) and the CocoonDance Company (28 Feb), contemporary dance returns to the Elbphilharmonie. Lastly, with the Arditti Quartet (11 May) and the Kronos Quartet (14 May), two of the leading string quartets of our time celebrate their 50th anniversaries.

Two icons of New Music also come under the spotlight in the new season: György Kurtág is known as the master of miniatures. The condensed music of the 97-year-old Hungarian composer continues to be a profound influence on young composers to this day. This season, the Elbphilharmonie presents the German premiere of his Beckett opera »Fin de partie« (14 Oct), whose premiere in 2018 garnered global attention. The Italian Luigi Nono was one of the most influential composers of the post-war avantgarde. He would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2024 – and a selection of his works is being performed to mark this occasion. »Il canto sospeso« (15 Mar) is a work of great political urgency. In it, Nono sets to music words from the farewell letters of the young men and women of the European resistance that had been condemned to death during the Second World War. The SWR Experimentalstudio (14 Mar) and France’s Quatuor Diotima (13 Mar) also give concerts of Nono’s works.

Teodor Currentzis is giving three concerts in the Elbphilharmonie with the SWR Symphonieorchester. At the beginning of the season he presents Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 (30 Sep), whose epithet »Babi Yar« refers to a ravine near Kyiv in which the Wehrmacht carried out one of its biggest massacres of the Second World War in 1941, with most of the victims being Ukrainian Jews. Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem, on which the work is based, is also a scathing critique of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. In June 2024, Currentzis – bringing to an end his time as chief conductor of the SWR Symphonieorchester – presents Benjamin Britten’s »War Requiem« (16 Jun).

Two monumental works of piano music are illuminated from very different angles: Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor is a unique balancing act between despair and joyous delirium. Five very personal versions can be heard over the coming season, embedded in different musical contexts. Interpreters include the Chopin Piano Competition winner Yulianna Avdeeva (17 Feb) and aspiring young newcomers such as the Israeli pianist Yoav Levanon (19 Oct). Bach’s »Goldberg Variations« are a masterpiece of the Baroque art of variation. The multi-facetted riches of the work can be experienced more than once in the Elbphilharmonie and the Laeiszhalle – on different instruments. Víkingur Ólafsson takes to the modern grand piano in two concerts (Laeiszhalle, 10 Oct, Elbphilharmonie, 25 Jun), while Jean Rondeau presents the original version for harpsichord (4 Dec). And a string trio (21 Dec) and a combination of saxophone, accordion and cello (14 Apr) explore very different spheres of sound.

The Elbphilharmonie established the FAST LANE series for musicians who are already on the threshold of an international career. These six evenings are an opportunity to experience charismatic artists who are currently making waves with new ideas and courageous programmes. Concerts across all genres provide fascinating insights into the future of the music world: Théotime Langlois de Swarte and Thomas Dunford as an exciting duo on the Baroque violin and lute (15 Apr), aspiring new classical artists such as Randall Goosby (violin), Julia Hagen (cello) and Mao Fujita (piano), and jazz high-flyer Samara Joy with her band (7 Nov).

Iran and Iraq, Syria and Turkey: Kurdish culture stretches across an enormous geographical area. But it is a culture that finds itself in a permanent state of exception – censorship, persecution and fragmentation across several countries and global exile. The KURDISTAN Festival (17–19 Nov) now celebrates the riches of Kurdish music. The festival is proud to welcome the Alevi singer Aynur – the biggest star in Kurdish singing. The leading Iranian-Kurdish spike-violin virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor has condensed the grief over Saddam Hussein’s atrocities into a composition. In a second concert, Kalhor performs an intimate duo with Erdal Erzincan’s bağlama lute. Danûk is a Syrian-Kurdish ensemble whose members fled the war in Syria. In Vienna, the Iranian-Iraqi ensemble Kurdophone has developed a jazzy exile voice that can now be experienced in the Elbphilharmonie for the first time. On the final day of the festival, a number of concerts and accompanying events are dedicated to the richness of the historical region of Dersim, now the province of Tunceli.

One concert series explores the art of the jazz harp. With her majestic, cosmic playing, Brandee Younger walks in the footsteps of the great Afro-American harpists Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane (25 Oct). The Swiss harpist Julie Campiche and her quartet create fascinating soundscapes with fine electronic adjustments to the harp sound (6 Dec). And Kathrin Pechlof from Cologne and her long-standing trio weave a minimal, mysterious and poetic yet abstract tapestry of chamber music (19 Jan). The Colombian Edmar Castaneda pulls off a virtuosic tightrope act on his electrically amplified instrument (12 Mar).

Alongside this spotlight series, the Elbphilharmonie also, as always, presents an extensive jazz programme, including concerts by regular guests such as Brad Mehldau (11 May), Jason Moran (19 April) and Wolfgang Muthspiel (21 Oct), as well as a number of special projects. Cécile McLorin Salvant, with the large-scale and full-length »Ogresse«, presents a favourite project she has been working on for years (9 Mar). The Elbphilharmonie debut of esperanza spalding, as part of an all-star tribute concert featuring the orchestral music of the recently deceased saxophone legend Wayne Shorter (14 Nov), promises to be a special highlight. Beyond the world of jazz, the Elbphilharmonie welcomes illustrious figures such as Elvis Costello (19 Sep) and Caetano Veloso (4 Oct).

The Elbphilharmonie has become a very popular venue for electronic music in recent years. One of the artists performing as part of the »ePhil« series in the coming season is the Colombian experimental musician Lucrecia Dalt (28 Sep), whose album »¡Ay!« was recently hailed as an event by »The Wire« and awarded the coveted label »Best New Music« by »Pitchfork«. Hatis Noit (18 Jan), whose fans include cult director David Lynch and producing legend Rick Rubin, exhibits a dazzling vocal artistry that oscillates between traditional Japanese vocal music and retro futurism. The »Ghosted« project by the trio led by the Australian composer and multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi stretches the boundaries between minimalism and improvisation (8 Feb), while Nala Sinephro produces atmospheric ambient jazz on the harp (17 Apr). The Berghain resident DJ JakoJako is guaranteed to get the Kaistudio dancing (5 Apr), and the audio-visual artist Max Cooper brings his London beats to the Recital Hall (11 Nov).

In the 2023/24 season, the theme of the Hamburg International Music Festival is »War and Peace«. With Olivier Messiaen’s only opera »Saint François d’Assise«, about the saint and peacemaker Francis of Assisi, Kent Nagano and his Philharmonic State Orchestra bring an apt and elaborately staged project to the Grand Hall on three evenings. In the festival’s opening concert, Alan Gilbert and the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra present music by Schönberg, Weill and Ives (26/27 Apr). The full programme will be published in November 2023.

With more than 1,000 events in the Elbphilharmonie and across Hamburg, music education is an integral element in the Elbphilharmonie programme. Many of these events are workshops, which are attended by tens of thousands of participants each year. With the »Elbphilharmonie Soundtracker«, the concert hall now has a new mobile workshop offering for creative music-making. As part of the project, a team of specialists from the Elbphilharmonie travels to schools and city-district centres across Hamburg to get creative with teenagers and adults. Participants combine various art forms, use recycled and digital instruments, and create images, recordings or choreographies. »Let’s play« is a »live gaming concert«: Various computer games are streamed on the big screen in the Grand Hall, and played in interaction with orchestral music and the sounds of a Foley artist (13 Feb).