The Berlin Philharmonie, designed by Hans Scharoun. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The Berliner Philharmoniker’s 2026/27 season, opened at the end of August by Kirill Petrenko with Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, is built around an anniversary that will run through the whole of musical Europe: the bicentenary of Beethoven’s death, 26 March 2027. In Berlin they take it on as hosts: Beethoven is the orchestra’s genetic inheritance, along with Mendelssohn, Brahms and Strauss, and they set him inside the January biennale titled Signs and Wonders, devoted to the most ambitious question a programme can ask: what faith guides us. In the middle sits the Missa solemnis, which has been answering that question for two centuries without answering it.
Petrenko conducts an unusually high number of concerts by his standards, forty-seven symphonic evenings, and continues his Ring: Die Walküre arrives at the Salzburg Easter Festival in March 2027, with the orchestra in the pit as in the days of Karajan, who invented that festival. There is also a fairy tale, Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, which curiously rhymes with the same choice made this year by La Fenice: 2027 will be the year in which half of Europe puts the Wagnerian fairy tale for families back on stage. Among the guests, Dudamel with Mahler’s Seventh and Bruckner’s Fourth, Rattle coming home, Mäkelä, and the first appearances of Elim Chan and Maxime Pascal; the composer in residence is Brett Dean, with a world premiere. The tour of the year is news in itself: South America, Bogotá, São Paulo and Buenos Aires, where the Berliners have not been for more than twenty-five years, closing at Carnegie Hall.
The Melos view, in two points. First: the Roman public has a rare opportunity, because Petrenko will be at Santa Cecilia in mid-November, and hearing the same baton in Berlin by streaming and in Rome live in the same month is a free course in comparative acoustics. Second: the Beethoven bicentenary risks, like every anniversary, turning into a traffic jam of complete cycles; the Berlin choice to set it inside a question, faith, rather than inside a catalogue, is the difference between programming and celebrating. We will return to it in two days, looking at how Italy is preparing for the same appointment. Sources: official presentation of the 2026/27 season, Berliner Philharmoniker, and press materials from the Foundation.