As the old saying goes, «it’s the first impression that counts»! So naturally, the 2025/26 season had to get off to a flying start. And who better than the Berliner Philharmoniker to set the tone for musical excellence? For the first concert of the season, they will be treating us to Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, conducted by Kirill Petrenko.
This spectacular opener will be followed by other great names in music: the artists of the Teatro alla Scala conducted by Riccardo Chailly, violinist Lisa Batiashvili accompanied by the Münchner Philharmoniker with Lahav Shani at the helm, and finally our beloved Luxembourg Philharmonic, which kicks off its season under the baton of Sir John Eliot Gardiner.
The common thread running through these exceptional concerts is literature. The painter Eugène Delacroix once remarked that «in literature, the first impression is the strongest». That certainly appears to be true of composers, many of whom were deeply and lastingly inspired by words they read. In that sense, William Shakespeare has a leading role this early season, with the Luxembourg Philharmonic performing Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Riccardo Chailly conducting music from Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello.
Theatre will remain the central theme of that same evening, with the musicians and singers of La Scala performing choruses from operas based on plays by Lord Byron, Voltaire, Alexandre Dumas, and Friedrich Schiller, with William Tell, a work inspired not only by the German author’s play, but also by Switzerland’s mythical founding father. Other folk tales and legends will feature in the concerts to follow, with the Prelude and Death of Isolde from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and Goethe’s poem Die erste Walpurgisnacht set to music by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
In short, you can look forward to an opening of the 2025/26 season at the crossroads of the arts. It will most certainly leave an excellent first impression, one that bodes well for what is to come!
Marie-Clémentine Crestia
