Sommernachtskonzert 2026 - Summer Night Concert 2026 Wiener Philharmoniker & Lorenzo Viotti

• Franz von Suppé (1819 - 1895): Leichte Kavallerie:
• 1 Suppé: Leichte Kavallerie: Overture 07:03
• Arrigo Boito (1842 - 1918): Mefistofele:
• 2 Boito: Mefistofele: Son lo spirito che nega 03:32
• Giacomo Puccini (1858 - 1924): Manon Lescaut:
• 3 Puccini: Manon Lescaut: Intermezzo 05:11
• Giuseppe Verdi (1813 - 1901): Falstaff:
• 4 Verdi: Falstaff: Ehi! paggio!... L'onore! Ladri! 04:29
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893): The Nutcracker:
• 5 Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker: Trepak 01:14
• Florence Price (1887 - 1953): Adoration:
• 6 Price: Adoration 02:39
• Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897 - 1957): Straussiana:
• 7 Korngold: Straussiana 07:06
• Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883): Das Rheingold:
• 8 Wagner: Das Rheingold: Abendlich strahlt der Sonne Auge 04:37
• Jules Massenet (1842 - 1912): Thaïs:
• 9 Massenet: Thaïs: Méditation 05:49
• Maurice Ravel (1875 - 1937): Daphnis et Chloé:
• 10 Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé: Suite No. 2 16:11
• Jerry Bock (1928 - 2010): Fiddler on the Roof:
• 11 Bock: Fiddler on the Roof: If I Were a Rich Man 05:35
• Zequinha De Abreu (1880 - 1935): Tico-Tico no fubá:
• 12 Abreu: Tico-Tico no fubá 04:04
• Johann Strauss II:Wiener Blut, Walzer, Op. 354:
• 13 Strauss II: Wiener Blut, Walzer, Op. 354 09:09
• Total Runtime 01:16:39

Info for Sommernachtskonzert 2026 - Summer Night Concert 2026

The Vienna Philharmonic’s Summer Night Concert is one of the major highlights of the concert year—for the orchestra as well as for ORF and audiences around the world. Set amid the baroque park landscape and framed by the extraordinary scenery of Schönbrunn Palace and the Gloriette, the Summer Night Concert is inspired by the idea of making classical music accessible to everyone and serves as an annual gift from the orchestra to the people of Vienna and all music lovers.

For the first time, the up-and-coming Swiss conductor Lorenzo Viotti will take the podium at the open-air stage in Schönbrunn. Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, who has enjoyed a close collaboration with the Vienna Philharmonic for decades—whether in opera or in concerts—will also make his debut in the palace park at night.

Devils, gods, antiheroes, and a great deal of love

The programme of the 2026 Summer Night Concert offers an exceptional journey through the worlds of opera, operetta and the musical, which are closely intertwined with the realms of ballet, dance and the church. At the conductor’s podium, Lorenzo Viotti will be making his début at the Summer Night Concert, as will the Welsh bass-baritone Sir Bryn Terfel, who has enjoyed a close collaboration with the orchestra in opera and concert performances for several decades.

The concert opens with Franz von Suppè, a representative of Viennese operetta who stood out from his contemporaries not only because of his Dalmatian origins but also through his imaginative overtures. With its references to hussars and the csárdás, Light Cavalry, as the first operetta, will transport us to another region of the Habsburg Monarchy: Hungary. However, the military-themed work, which premièred at Vienna’s Carltheater in 1866, struggled to gain traction on stage. The Habsburg defeat against Prussia, the loss of the remaining Italian territories and the need to renegotiate relations with the Kingdom of Hungary caused public interest to wane – with the exception of the overture, which later even made its way into the stadium of the German Bundesliga football club Eintracht Frankfurt as the goal anthem as well as into Frank Zappa’s song Jesus Thinks You’re A Jerk.

At the same time that the Viennese operetta was becoming established, Arrigo Boito was forging new paths for opera in the young Kingdom of Italy. In Milan, the young Scapigliatura group (“the Disheveled Ones” or “the Unkempt Ones”) rebelled against conservative cultural trends. Boito, who was well-versed in German literature, dared to break new ground in 1868 with his Mefistofele, based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragedy Faust, which had previously made its mark primarily on French stages through Hector Berlioz and Charles Gounod. The diabolical title character appears as “the spirit that always denies” with an aria that clothes Goethe’s original work in a boldly dramatic guise and shatters conventions with its partly whistled refrain.

As a pioneer of modern Italian opera, Boito exerted a decisive influence on both the younger and older generations of Italian composers. With his stage works, Giacomo Puccini paved the way for Verismo through his naturalistic depiction of tragic destinies outside the upper social classes. As the unfaithful lover of a wealthy tax collector, Manon Lescaut is arrested and deported to Louisiana, where she dies of thirst in the desert in the arms of her lover Des Grieux, who had accompanied her. In the Intermezzo sinfonico, Puccini recounts Manon’s imprisonment and transfer to Le Havre, siding with his ostracised protagonist.

As a librettist, Boito also inspired Giuseppe Verdi – nearly thirty years his senior – to return to composing after a long creative hiatus, resulting in his two late operas Otello and Falstaff, both based on Shakespeare. In Falstaff – their version of The Merry Wives of Windsor, whose other well-known musical setting was composed by Otto Nicolai, founder of the Wiener Philharmoniker – the librettist and the composer pull out all the stops in their comedic character study of an antihero. When, at the beginning of the opera, the penniless knight Sir John Falstaff writes two identical love letters to two married women in order to gain access to their husbands’ fortunes, all while reflecting on noble honour, Boito puts a light-hearted variation of Mephistopheles’ nihilism into his mouth: “What is honour? Can it accomplish anything? Nothing.”

The trepak is a dance rooted in the culture of Russian and Ukrainian Cossacks, performed in 2/4 time and characterised by spectacular leaps, rhythmic stamping, and crouching steps and hops similar to the kazachok. The trepak first appeared in classical music in 1892 in the second act of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. There, in the “Kingdom of Sweets”, it provides a counterpoint to the culinary-inspired character dances of chocolate, coffee, tea and ginger.

Adoration by the African-American composer, pianist, organist and educator Florence Price offers a tranquil contrast to the exuberant dance. Price’s works have gained widespread recognition in recent years following the discovery of numerous manuscripts in her former summer home in Illinois in 2009. Adoration is an organ piece composed in 1951, and its contemplative style evokes a prayer that ends with an “Amen”. The Summer Night Concert will feature Elaine Fine’s arrangement for string orchestra.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold, too, had to find his place in the United States as an emigrant persecuted by the Nazis. The renowned opera composer established his second career in Hollywood through film scores. Just how deeply Korngold remained rooted in his native Vienna is evident in his arrangements of Johann Strauß’s operettas in the post-Romantic style of the 1920s and 1930s, of which A Night in Venice remains a staple of the repertoire to this day. After World War II, Korngold attempted to re-establish himself in Europe as a composer of classical orchestral music, but stylistically he was far removed from the post-war avant-garde. In his Straussiana, composed in 1953, he looks nostalgically from California back towards Vienna by once again turning to Strauß scores: first the Neue Pizzicato-Polka, which had been incorporated into the operetta Fürstin Ninetta as interlude music; then the Polka française Bitte schön! from Cagliostro in Wien, transformed into a mazurka in triple meter; and finally a waltz from the opera Ritter Pásmán, which had been premièred at the Court Opera in 1892 by members of the Wiener Philharmoniker. Korngold’s dazzling orchestral colours are characterised by additional percussion instruments, piano and harp, the expanded use of woodwinds and the sobbing swells of the strings. Korngold had conducted the Wiener Philharmoniker on several occasions during the interwar period, and the orchestra will now pay tribute to him by performing Straussiana for the first time.

With Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold, the first part of his Der Ring des Nibelungen tetralogy, the Wiener Philharmoniker commemorates the cycle’s world première in Bayreuth in 1876, which marked the opening of the Festspielhaus on the “Green Hill”. The Wiener Philharmoniker has direct ties to Bayreuth through Hans Richter, the conductor of the première, who played the horn in the Wiener Philharmoniker from 1862 to 1866, and then conducted the orchestra’s subscription concerts from 1875 to 1898. Musicians from the orchestra’s ranks also played in the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra. “The sunlight shines at evening; in glorious radiance the castle stands resplendent,” sings Wotan, father of the gods, before the gods enter Valhalla, newly built through a breach of contract. The radiant splendour, however, will fade dramatically in the three subsequent parts of the Ring cycle.

On the French side, in contrast to Wagner, stood the immensely prolific Jules Massenet, whose operas Manon and Werther establish thematic links to both Puccini and Boito. On the other hand, Thaïs, premièred in 1894, clearly embodies the spirit of the fin de siècle: in early Christian Egypt, the monk Athanaël attempts to convert the actress and courtesan Thaïs to a chaste life. Thaïs meditates on this to the sound of the violin, while the moralising preacher sleeps outside her house – or perhaps does not sleep at all… The scene takes place behind a closed curtain, yet the undeniably sentimental music encourages the audience all the more explicitly to imagine the eroticism underlying this meditation on renunciation. With the “Méditation”, an instrumental work by Massenet will appear on a Wiener Philharmoniker concert programme for the first time in over one hundred years.

Following these pieces of evening and night music, Maurice Ravel’s Second Orchestral Suite, which he compiled from his ballet Daphnis et Chloé in 1913, opens with a “Daybreak”. The one-act ballet is based on an ancient Greek romance by Longus and is set on the island of Lesbos. To enchantingly magical sounds, the shepherd Daphnis awakens and is reunited with his beloved. The shepherdess Chloé had previously been abducted by pirates. The music then heralds the lovers’ reunion. In the following “Pantomime”, Ravel depicts the intense emotions between the lovers, whom he transforms into the mythical figures of Pan and Syrinx. The suite culminates in the concluding “General Dance” with near-ecstatic intensity. During an evening celebration, Daphnis and Chloé are united – a scenario perfectly suited to the setting of the Summer Night Concert in the Schönbrunn Palace Gardens.

Jerry Bock’s musical Fiddler on the Roof, with lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, premièred on Broadway in 1964; it draws on stories by Sholem Aleichem written between 1894 and 1914, and was adapted for the stage by Joseph Stein. The story centres on episodes from the life of the Jewish milkman Tevye in the fictional Russian shtetl of Anatevka, which evoke Aleichem’s own experiences in “Yehupetz” – as he called the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. In “If I Were a Rich Man,” Tevye turns to God and wishes for enough money so that he can marry off his three daughters without financial worries. Throughout the musical, Tevye is repeatedly confronted with existential questions, yet his love for his family and the people around him, his wisdom, and his humour give him the strength to overcome all adversity. (Silvia Kargl / Friedemann Pestel)

Sir Bryn Terfel,bass-baritone
Wiener Philharmoniker
Lorenzo Viotti, conductor

Sir Bryn Terfel
Welsh bass-baritone Sir Bryn Terfel has been moving audiences worldwide with the qualities of his mighty voice and his insightful artistry for more than three decades. With a repertoire that ranges from opera and sacred music to Lieder and musical theatre, he has cultivated a peerless degree of stylistic versatility over the years. In the latest of many honours bestowed on him, he was invited to perform at the coronation service for King Charles III on 6 May 2023 and at the Coronation Concert in the grounds of Windsor Castle on 7 May, making him the only artist to appear at both events. During the service he joined the Choir of Westminster Abbey in singing Paul Mealor’s beautiful Coronation Kyrie, the first Welsh-language work ever to be performed at a coronation. At the concert the following day, meanwhile, he and tenor Andrea Bocelli gave a heartfelt rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel. In 2024, he will celebrate his 30th anniversary as an exclusive DG artist.

Terfel was born in North Wales in 1965. After studies at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he attracted international attention in 1989 when he won the Lieder prize at the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition. The following year he made his professional operatic debut as Guglielmo in Così fan tutte for Welsh National Opera. His career gathered momentum in 1991 with significant debuts as Mozart’s Figaro at English National Opera and in the US for Santa Fe Opera; it took off at the Salzburg Festival in 1992 with an outstanding performance as Jochanaan in Salome and an equally impressive debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as Masetto in Don Giovanni.

Since then, his operatic repertoire has grown to encompass the title roles in Boris Godunov, Der fliegende Holländer, Falstaff and Gianni Schicchi; Wotan in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre; Méphistophélès in Faust; the four villains in Les contes d’Hoffmann; Balstrode in Peter Grimes; Wolfram in Tannhäuser; Nick Shadow in The Rake’s Progress; and Scarpia in Tosca, among others. He has also made extremely successful forays into the world of musicals, starring to huge acclaim in both Sweeney Todd and Fiddler on the Roof.

Sir Bryn is equally at home on the concert platform, highlights of his long and varied career including the Wales Millennium Centre’s opening ceremony; the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall; a gala concert with Andrea Bocelli in Central Park, New York; and a Christmas concert streamed live from Brecon Cathedral as part of the Met Stars Live in Concert series.

Terfel signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon in 1993 and sang the title role in Le nozze di Figaro under John Eliot Gardiner for his first (Archiv) recording. His debut DG solo release was an album of Schubert songs recorded with Malcolm Martineau in 1994, while English song supplied the repertoire for his second, The Vagabond. These were followed by Opera Arias, Something Wonderful, a collection of hit songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and If Ever I Would Leave You, an album of Broadway songs.

His DG discography continued to grow with such diverse releases as We’ll Keep a Welcome, Bryn Terfel Sings Favourites, Simple Gifts, Silent Noon, Tutto Mozart!, Bad Boys and Homeward Bound. Terfel’s opera recordings include a Ring cycle (Metropolitan Opera production), Der fliegende Holländer (from Opernhaus Zürich) and Don Giovanni (La Scala). Two recent releases on DG’s Verbier Festival Gold label feature live recordings from Verbier: a 2011 recital of songs by Schubert, Schumann, Ibert and Quilter, and a 2016 semi-staged performance of Falstaff.

His latest recording is Sea Songs, a collection of sea shanties, sailor songs and maritime folk tunes from around the world. He is joined on the album by a remarkable line-up of guest artists, including Sting, Eve Goodman, Sir Simon Keenlyside, Hannah Stone, Calan and Fisherman’s Friends. With tracks including “Ar lan y môr”, “The Green Willow Tree”, “Drunken Sailor”, “Sloop John B”, “The Wellerman” and many more, Sea Songs will be released in February 2024.

Terfel’s 2023–24 season includes returns to the Wiener Staatsoper as Dulcamara in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, to take the title role in Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer; concerts at the Sala São Paolo and Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires; recitals in New York’s Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center, Washington D.C.; and a revival of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd for Opernhaus Zurich.

Sir Bryn has won numerous Grammys, Classical Brits and Gramophone awards. In 2003, he was made a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for services to opera; in 2006 he became the second recipient of the Queen’s Medal for Music; and in 2017 received a knighthood for services to music. In February 2022 he was named a Kammersänger – an honour bestowed by the Austrian government for his services to the Wiener Staatsoper. A passionate advocate for music education and for his native language and culture, he has recently launched a new foundation in partnership with the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama. Cronfa Syr Bryn Terfel will offer scholarships and bursaries; support projects and commissions that celebrate the Welsh language and culture; and establish a new biennial international song competition in which students will sing at least one song in Welsh and one in their own language.

Lorenzo Viotti
was born in Lausanne into a family of musicians. After studying piano, voice and percussion in Lyon, he trained to be a conductor under Georg Mark in Vienna, while at the same time performing as a percussionist in a variety of different ensembles including the Vienna Philharmonic. He went on to hone his skills in Weimar under the guidance of Nicolas Pasquet. He made his opera debut conducting Le nozze di Figaro at the Schönbrunn Theatre in 2013. That same year, he won the International Conducting Competition in Cadaquès (Spain). Two years later, at the age of 25, he won the highly prestigious Young Conductor Award at the Salzburg Festival. In 2016, he made his debut leading the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Verbier Chamber Orchestra as well as the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Salzburg Festival. In 2017, he conducted several concerts at the Salzburg Summer Festival and shared the rostrum with Christian Thielemann for a concert honouring Herbert von Karajan to mark the 50th anniversary of the Easter Festival. He has conducted numerous symphony orchestras including the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, the Berlin Staatskapelle the Orchestre National de France, the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Radio Munich Orchestra, the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. He has also been musical director of the Gulbenkian Orchestra since the 2018-2019 season and he was recently appointed as the principal conductor of the Dutch National Opera and the Dutch Philharmonic Orchestra—a role he will assume at the beginning of the 2021-2022 season. Over the last few years, he has conducted La Belle Hélène at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Rossini’s La Cambiale di matrimonio at La Fenice in Vence, Carmen and La Bohème in Klagenfurt, Rigoletto in Stuttgart and Dresden, Donizetti’s Viva la Mamma at the Lyon Opera, Werther in Zurich, Klagenfurt and Frankfurt, Tosca at the New National Theatre in Tokyo and the Frankfurt Opera, and Carmen, first at the Hamburg Staatsoper and then for his debut at the Paris Opera. During the 2019-2020 season, he made his debut at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam with Pagliacci / Cavalleria rusticana and conducted Manon Lescaut in Frankfurt, Roméo et Juliette at Milan’s La Scala, Madame Butterfly in Dresden and La Bohème at the Paris Opera. Lorenzo Viotti received the Newcomers Award at the 2017 International Opera Awards.

Booklet for Sommernachtskonzert 2026 - Summer Night Concert 2026