The 2024/2025 Season

The 2024/2025 season:
Music for all, by all, with all

Great artists, fascinating works, new formats and exciting experiments await our audiences in the 2024/2025 season.

With the motto »No concert without a female composer!«, the DSO is causing an international sensation: giving more attention to works by female composers remains a focus. In the future, we will also be devoting more attention to topics such as cultural diversity and social diversity. It is important to the orchestra, whose members come from 20 nations and which plays music by, with and for people from all over the world, to use its »language«, music, as a voice against all forms of discrimination.

We take up the topic of racism with ›The Passion of Octavius Catto‹ about the murdered civil rights activist of the same name, written by jazz pianist and composer Uri Caine. Anti-Semitism is at the heart of Aaron Zigman’s oratorio ›Émigré‹ - a moving story of Jewish exile in Shanghai - which we are now staging for the first time in Europe after acclaimed performances in Shanghai and New York

Farewell Robin Ticciati

In the 2024/2025 season, we say goodbye to our Music Director Robin Ticciati after more than seven years. For his last concerts, he has chosen works that are particularly close to his heart.

These include the music of Edward Elgar. Vilde Frang will play his violin concerto with its highly virtuoso solo part, while Gautier Capuçon will play the cello concerto, a tragic, melancholy farewell piece. The violin concerto opens a program that takes a look at Finnish musical worlds with Lotta Wennäkoski’s ›Flounce‹ and Sibelius’ Second Symphony. Ticciati combines the Cello Concerto with Bruckner’s Seventh, whose symphonies he has regularly performed. Mahler's music is also close to his heart, and he officially bids farewell to Mahler's Second in November. In an epilogue in December, he can be heard one last time as chief conductor with the world premiere of Mark Simpson's Viola Concerto and Beethoven’s ›Eroica‹.

Season Highlights

Long-standing companions and new friends will shape the other symphony concerts of the season – they include exciting discoveries such as the Double Concerto for Violin and Horn by Ethel Smyth, the First Symphony by Louise Farrenc or the ›Gaelic Symphony‹ by Amy Beach as well as great works from the repertoire: Beethoven’s ›Pastoral‹, Mendelssohn’s ›Scottish‹, Mozart’s ›Jenamy‹ Concerto, Brahms’ Third, Mahler’s Fourth, Bruckner’s Fifth, Shostakovich’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies.

The DSO will be conducted by Elim Chan, Maxim Emelyanychev, Marie Jacquot, Honorary Conductor Kent Nagano, Eva Ollikainen and Tarmo Peltokoski, among others. We also look forward to top-class soloists such as Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Maria João Pires, Renaud Capuçon, Isabelle Faust, Alice Sara Ott, Beatrice Rana, Joshua Bell, Gil Shaham, Midori and renowned vocalists such as Julian Prégardien and Anna Prohaska. We also welcome actress Iris Berben and are collaborating with the NDR Bigband for the first time.

The programme also includes three Casual Concerts, the expansion of the popular ›Notturno‹ series in cooperation with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation to 10 MUSEUMS, the continuation of the live podcast concert format ›Music and Crime‹, four cabaret concerts ›Die Kunst der UnFuge‹, six Children’s Concerts, two ›Schöne Töne Live‹ concerts, the 11^th ›Symphonic Mob‹, the opening and closing concert of the festival for new music ›Ultraschall Berlin‹ and New Year's Eve and New Year's Day with Circus Roncalli. We are also kicking off the new season together with the Berlin Zoological Garden and the new ›DSO at the Zoo‹ format on 8 September.