Artistic Director Alexander Jocqué about season 2025/26
What a privilege and pleasure it is to be able to present the Concertgebouw’s new season to you for the first time! And even more so because it is a season that is overflowing with ‘Love’ – after ‘Birth’ and ‘Coming-of-age’, the third stage in our journey through the major phases of human life.
Is there any subject that has been more sung about, written about, turned into music and brought to the stage than love? Inspiration in abundance for a season brimming with tales and declarations of love, with the occasional dash of heartbreak or envy.
This season is a celebration of love and relationships in all their many forms. Amorous love – heteronormative or otherwise, physical or spiritual – is featured. But we also highlight exceptional friendships, family and collegiality.
sightways
We are not simply paying tribute to love though. We are increasingly aware that the way love has been portrayed in art over the centuries, particularly with regard to the position of women, is often problematic or disconcerting. Just think of Carmen’s violent death because she rejects Don José's love in Bizet's eponymous opera.
As our Season’s Thinker we therefore consciously chose writer, performance artist, speaker and LGBTQ+ activist Fleur Pierets. Via her work, Fleur champions understanding and inclusion and adds critical annotations to what we might otherwise consider normal, even in the arts. As the season progresses you will discover, among other things, the video version of her performance piece 562 on our Circuit. She’ll also be introducing her latest book, discussing the sometimes dire position of women in art and music, and writing a love letter to a special woman from Bruges. You can help determine who exactly that is!
But Fleur is not the only one to pen a letter. Together with De Batterie, we are setting up a participatory artistic project that revolves around love letters. Actually, thinking about it, our whole 2025-26 season reads pretty much like a love letter – almost literally.
Is there any subject that has been more sung about, written about, turned into music and brought to the stage than love?
Our Darling Festival – an event in which we mainly celebrate romantic love – gets our theme off to a fine start. Alexandre Tharaud, for instance, transcribes the most beautiful French chansons (and when are they not about love?) for the piano. Answer Machine Tape, 1987 is a heartrending and intimate testimony to the relationship between two lovers in the midst of the 1980s AIDS epidemic. Love is also the leitmotif of the poems of 13th-century Sufi scholar Rumi in the performance Rumi Passion.
In a new edition of our chamber music festival Têtes-à-têtes, we shed light on various types of relationship and encounter. In concerts we focus on family ties, with works by families of composers, and on musical couples, artists not only in tune musically but also off stage in real life. Two such people are brand-new Concertgebouw Makers: Aisha Orazbayeva and Reinoud Van Mechelen, who share their joys, sorrows and music with, respectively, Peiman Khosravi and Anna Besson. We play matchmaker ourselves by bringing together performers and composers in combos we expect to produce sparks! But we also forge ties between you, our audience, and the performers, inviting you to meet and swap ideas over a drink in Forum 6.
Forever yours brings our season’s love letter to a poignant end. In this festival we bring you stories of forbidden love. The one about star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet – presented here in the Hector Berlioz version – is undoubtedly best known. But in Rameau's Les Boréades, Alphise and Abaris also have to overcome numerous hurdles before their path to love is finally clear. And choreographer Ali Chahrour expresses the problematic love between two men via the medium of tender dance.
Since the start of our five-year cycle geared to the phases of human life, we have linked each season’s theme to a seasonal transition. In the season devoted to ‘Birth’, we celebrated the winter solstice. ‘Coming of age’ carried the promise of the future, and therefore spring. And ‘Love’ we naturally associate with summer!
On the longest day of the year, we will celebrate midsummer with a Summer Solstice Happening. This festive day will have something for everyone, with a family performance, traditional music by the Hathor Consort and an exuberant ritual devised by Sídhe. Feel free to join us at our long table for a drink and a bite to eat in the cosy garden of the former Jesuit monastery.
It's not only our theme-festivals that are overflowing with love. A number of our regulars are returning with works that tie in here and there with our seasonal theme. The Budapest Festival Orchestra, for instance, our guests for three concerts, will be performing among other things the Vorspiel and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde.
During the Bach Academy, resident artists Vox Luminis immerse themselves in our season’s theme with a unique project: wedding cantatas. And where better to perform them than in the wedding venue par excellence, Bruges City Hall.
GOLD is also returning. In this festival, we delve into Bruges’s glorious history and follow in the footsteps of a prominent 15th-century figure who played a decisive role in the city’s development. In this edition, we paint a musical portrait of Mary of Burgundy, via festive music with a feminine touch from Bruges’s Golden Age.
But, as I already touched upon, love isn’t always a bed of roses. Season’s Photographer Julie Calbert strikingly captured the intensity, transience, complexity and occasional conflicts of love in a series of beautiful, layered images: a visual companion piece to the way love, in all its facets, is featured throughout this season in movement and sound.
But no matter how varied it may be, one thing is certain: there is always love!