The 2025 Vienna Philharmonic Summer Night Concert
With Tugan Sokhiev and Piotr Beczała
Cast
Program notes
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 orchestra together with some of the world’s most illustrious soloists — in front of an audience of up to 60,000 — in the gardens of Vienna’s world-famous Schönbrunn Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The 2025 edition features the Summer Night Concert debuts of maestro Tugan Sokhiev, star tenor Piotr Beczała, and the world-renowned Vienna Boys Choir in a pan-European program featuring some of the most famous opera and ballet music ever written. Beczała lends his voice to beloved arias including "Nessun dorma" from Puccini's Turandot, and the Vienna Boys Choir performs the "Elves' Song" from Offenbach's Die Rheinnixen, famously reused later as the Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann. Highlights from various European traditions abound with favorite works by Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Dvořák, Mascagni, Saint-Saëns, Berlioz, and Otto Nicolai — founder of the Vienna Philharmonic and composer of The Merry Wives of Windsor, whose Overture is dedicated this evening to the 25th anniversary of Vienna's Haus für Musik in Nicolai's former residence.
Photo © Julius Silver
