The 2024 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 orchestra together with some of the world’s most illustrious soloists—in front of an audience of up to 100,000—in the gardens of Vienna’s world-famous Schönbrunn Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The 2024 edition marks 20 years since the first Summer Night Concert and to celebrate, the Vienna Philharmonic are joined by Latvian maestro Andris Nelsons and Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen for a performance of popular works highlighting the rich European musical tradition. The programme features a selection of opera excerpts by nineteenth-century masters Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, as well as three pieces celebrating the bicentennial of Czech composer Bedřich Smetana. The evening continues with orchestral interlude La nuit et l'amour by Irish-born Augusta Holmès, a little-performed female composer who studied in France with César Franck and greatly admired Wagner's music, before coming to a thrilling close with a pair of crowd-pleasing mainstays of the repertoire: Aram Khachaturian's energetic Sabre Dance and Dmitri Shostakovich's jazz-infused Waltz No. 2, from his Suite for Variety Orchestra. 

Photo © Julius Silver