Welcome to our 2025–2026 London Season at the Royal Albert Hall and Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall.
When you have the privilege to conduct a great orchestra, you get used to thinking big. Naturally, I do my best to aim high: to share with you, our audience, the finest melodies, the strongest emotions, the most magnificent sounds. But for me, there’s another side to music-making, and in its own way, it’s a sort of miracle. You might be sitting in an iconic venue like the Royal Albert Hall or the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, surrounded by thousands of fellow listeners but as soon as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra starts to play, we have only one aim – to create music that speaks directly to you.
This season, we’re certainly thinking big again – playing music to make your ears tingle and your heart soar. The cosmic visions of Wagner’s Parsifal; the raw power of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony; the joy of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, and the incredible, ecstatic Third Symphony of Scriabin – a rarely-heard Russian masterpiece that aims straight for heaven itself. And then we have the epic world of Gustav Mahler: three mighty symphonies that seem to embrace the whole of human life.
There are quieter moments, too; music that’s very personal to me, and which I’m eager to share. There’s the grace of Mozart, the passion of Puccini, intimate moments from Mahler, and wonderful, less well-known scores by Galina Ustvolskaya and Sergei Taneyev. We’ll play a piece by our brilliant Composer-in-Association, Joe Hisaishi, who’s fired imagination all over the world as the composer behind the vivid scores of Hayao Miyzaki’s Studio Ghibli. And there are those special moments when we get to share the joys of music-making – large and small – with friends like Ray Chen, who plays Korngold’s beautiful Violin Concerto, and pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, who explores a young Beethoven at his most playful in his First Piano Concerto, to name just two of our guests this season.
So, we can promise you thrills, as well as beauty, tenderness, poetry and wit, all of it created especially for you. Even the greatest music can only speak if there are ears to listen. This season, we want to move you and surprise you: join us, and make the conversation – and the art – complete.
Vasily Petrenko, RPO Music Director
