The 2020 Vienna Philharmonic Summer Night Concert

Every year, as the days grow longer, Austria gets ready for one of the classical calendar’s highlights: the Vienna Philharmonic’s Summer Night Concert. This event, inaugurated in 2004, brings the prestigious ensemble together with some of the world’s most illustrious soloists—in front of an audience that regularly numbers more than 100,000—in the gardens of Vienna’s world-famous Schönbrunn Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Songs of love are on the program at the 2020 Summer Night Concert, which sees the Vienna Philharmonic join Valery Gergiev (in his fourth Summer Night Concert appearance) and celebrated tenor Jonas Kaufmann, which opens with the passionate Prelude from Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. Amid excerpts from romantic masterpieces like Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Maurice Jarre's score from Doctor Zhivago, and Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann, Kaufmann takes the stage to deliver arias from Massenet's Werther, Kálmán's Countess Maritza, and Puccini's Turandot (the stirring "Nessun dorma!"), finally closing on a love song to the city itself: the enchanting titular song from Wien, du Stadt meiner Traüme (Vienna, City of My Dreams).

Photo © Julius Silver