The Sala Santa Cecilia during a concert by the Orchestra Notturna Clandestina. ONC archive.
The 2026/27 season of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia opens on 21 October with the kind of choice that defines a mandate: Wagner’s Siegfried in concert form, conducted by Daniel Harding, three evenings. A symphony orchestra that takes on an entire day of the Ring is an orchestra declaring that it feels like an opera house without the house, and the wager continues in spring with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, again with Harding, in May.
The calendar of guest podiums is that of a European capital. The name worth the ticket on its own arrives early: Kirill Petrenko, the conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker who doesn’t record and doesn’t give interviews, on 12, 13 and 14 November. Antonio Pappano comes home twice, in November and February; then Charles Dutoit in March, Manfred Honeck at the end of the month, and a Beethoven cycle that crosses the winter: the Eroica with Riccardo Minasi in January, the Missa solemnis with Fabio Luisi in February, in the midst of the bicentenary. In April and May two heavyweight Mahlers, the Fifth and the Sixth. Among the soloists, Martha Argerich, Beatrice Rana, Lisa Batiashvili, Daniil Trifonov, and an evening with Joe Hisaishi that will fill the hall with an audience that had never set foot in Santa Cecilia: a choice this magazine approves without irony, because new audiences come in through the doors they find open.
A calendar note Melos readers already know: between Petrenko’s three evenings and Pappano’s return, on Sunday 15 November, the Sala Santa Cecilia changes its skin for one night: the Classical Rave of the Orchestra Notturna Clandestina, inside the Romaeuropa Festival. In the same week, in the same hall, the most liturgical audience in Italy and the one that dances: no other auditorium in Europe, this month, holds the two extremes together. It is the exact picture of what a concert hall can be when it stops being afraid: a place, not a rite. Sources: official programme of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, 2026/27 season.