Festivals and guest performances
Season 2025/2026 Tour Concerts
Apart from its concerts in Berlin, the DSO is also present in many guest appearances in international music life. The orchestra has held performances in the major concert halls of Europe, North and South America, the Near, Middle and Far East. In cooperation with Deutsche Welle and the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs the orchestra gave concerts in Brazil and Argentina, in Japan, China, Malaysia, Abu Dhabi and Eastern Europe. The DSO is also guesting at national and international festivals such as Rheingau Musik Festival, the Edinburgh International Festival, the Salzburg Festival, the BBC Proms and the Beethovenfest Bonn.
In the 2024-25 season, the DSO will again be present beyond its Berlin concerts on the national and international music scene. Following the summer break, the DSO will begin its new season in Bonn at the Beethovenfest. Here on 31 August 2025, Anja Bihlmaier conducts the orchestra in the programme they’ll later present during the Berlin Musikfest. It includes Tchaikovsky’s ›Rococo Variations‹ – cello soloist: Kian Soltani – and Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony. A day before, the DSO invites a host of amateur musicians from Bonn and its surroundings to form a ›Symphonic Mob‹.
The DSO will head off for an 11-day China tour from 7 to 18 September 2025. For their concerts in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan and a finale in Beijing’s spectacular National Centre for the Performing Arts, conductor Patrick Hahn and pianist Fazıl Say will be bringing along, among other works, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
On 2 November 2025, Marin Alsop and pianist Hayato Sumino will take their Berlin DSO programme of Chopin’s First Piano Concerto and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony to the art deco hall of Brussels’s Palais des Beaux-Arts (Bozar). Robin Ticciati is continuing the Mahler cycle he began as the DSO’s Music Director with the Sixth Symphony. He and his orchestra will perform it on 20 December 2025 at Dortmund’s Konzerthaus.
The DSO under conductor Constantinos Carydis and pianist Mao Fujita will visit the Isarphilharmonie in Munich on 10 May 2026, performing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto and Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie fantastique’. During the tradition-steeped Prague Spring, the DSO under Tomáš Hanus will be heard on 31 May 2026 at the Smetana Hall in the Czech capital’s splendid art nouveau Municipal House. On the programme will be Bruckner’s Sixth and an oboe or cello concerto performed by the winner of the festival’s own music competition.
Further festival concerts in Germany and The Netherlands are planned for summer 2026. Details to follow.