The 2025/2026 Season

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The Season at a Click
 

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›Afrodiaspora – Composing While Black‹

With its thematic focus ›Afrodiaspora – Composing While Black‹, the DSO remains true to its core principle: with relish and curiousity, lending its musical voice to the new, the unknown and the unprecedented, without neglecting the core repertoire of great symphonies and instrumental concertos. 

The spotlight is on the music of Black composers from four centuries and many countries who have introduced the most diverse musical traditions and worlds of experience into their compositions. The DSO is showcasing them and their works, which until now have hardly played a role in the Eurocentric canon and concert life or in the music-historical literature. In its symphonic concerts at the Philharmonie Berlin, it will present music by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Florence Price, William L. Dawson, Margaret Bonds and George Walker, as well as contemporaries Adolphus Hailstork, Billy Childs, Hannah Kendall, Olly Wilson and many others at DSO’s concerts at Philharmonie Berlin. 

Jessie Montgomery has been commissioned by the orchestra to write a concerto to be premiered by its »Artist in Focus«, the South African cellist Abel Selaocoe, a virtuoso at crossing over between musical worlds. There will also be two concerts of chamber music in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, which has been the collaborating partner in ›Afrodiaspora – Composing While Black‹. 
 

Read more: ›Afrodiaspora – Composing While Black‹

Chef Concerts

Three former and future Music Directors will ascend the DSO podium during the 2025/2026 season – most notably Kent Nagano. The orchestra’s Conductor Laureate is represented with six concerts and four programmes. Having devised a programme of Mahler’s ›Kindertotenlieder‹ and Fourth Symphony, he will then turn to the Spain imagined by Debussy and Strauss, travel to America with Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony and finally present the mysterious sound worlds of Bernstein’s ghost ballet ›Dybbuk‹. 

Ingo Metzmacher, who succeeded Nagano as Music Director, is coming with a programme that illustrates distinct facets of early 20th-century American music: songs by Margaret Bonds and Gershwin along with Ives’s radical ›Holidays Symphony‹. Robin Ticciati, who bade farewell to the DSO as Music Director last November with Mahler’s Second Symphony, returns to his Berlin orchestra with the same composer’s Sixth. And Kazuki Yamada, the orchestra’s Designated Chief Conductor and Artistic Director, will appear with a programme pairing music by Augusta Holmès with Schumann’s ›Spring‹ Symphony.

Guests and Programmes

Longtime companions and new friends have compiled the season’s remaining symphonic concerts. Manfred Honeck conducts two concerts with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, while Marin Alsop devotes her programme to Carlos Simon’s ›Fate Now Conquers‹ and Brahms’s Fourth. Stéphane Denève will conduct symphonic works featuring the organ composed by Samy Moussa and Saint-Saëns. Maxim Emelyanychev has chosen Mendelssohn’s mighty oratorio ›Elijah‹. Baroque specialist Giovanni Antonini will bring music of the 18th century by Bach, Bologne, Hummel and Mozart and also demonstrate his talent on the recorder. Markus Poschner, who made an impressive debut in 2024 with Bruckner’s Fourth, returns with his Ninth. Giancarlo Guerrero shows off the tonal colours and rhythms of Debussy and Stravinsky.

Santtu-Matias Rouvali and Aivis Greters tackle two of Richard Strauss’s biggest symphonic poems, ›Ein Heldenleben‹ and the ›Alpensinfonie‹. Dalia Stasevska is back following her acclaimed 2024 DSO debut with two concerts: in December the spotlight is on rhythm and soul with Ravel’s ›Boléro‹ and Dawson’s ›Negro Folk Symphony‹; in June she brings the orchestra’s season to a close with Mendelssohn’s buoyant, enchanting ›A Midsummer Night’s Dream‹.

No fewer than three symphonies by Dmitri Shostakovich will be heard this season, beginning at Musikfest Berlin with Anja Bihlmaier coupling his deceptively lightweight Ninth with Tchaikovsky’s graceful ›Rococo Variations‹. Tomáš Hanus conducts the composer’s First, while Rafael Payare takes on the Seventh along with Billy Childs’s Saxophone Concerto. Tabita Berglund devotes her concert to astronomical and historical adventures in sound, culminating in Grieg’s ›Peer Gynt‹, John Storgårds brings together the music of Florence Price and Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp. Eun Sun Kim makes her first DSO appearance with Brahms’s First and Swanson’s ›Short Symphony‹, and Adam Hickox explores outer space with Jessie Montgomery’s supernova piece ›Starburst‹ and Holst’s ›Planets‹.

The Thousand in Tempelhof

With the title ›The Thousand at Tempelhof‹, Mahler’s monumental Eighth Symphony will be given at a special concert in an unusual venue: in Tempelhof Airport’s historic Hangar 4, the DSO under James Gaffigan and a line-up of outstanding soloists will perform this so-called »Symphony of a Thousand«. Joining forces with the orchestra and soloists for this extraordinary event will be the Choral Soloists and Children’s Chorus of the Komische Oper, the Rundfunkchor Berlin and the Vocalconsort Berlin.

Season Brochure

You can find detailed information about the season in our online concert calendar, but also in our season brochure, which we will gladly send you free of charge, hot off the press, and which you can browse through digitally here: