The Academy Concerts in the 2026/27 season will also focus on the classical and romance tradition in the German-speaking area, highlights of the early modern period of the 20th century, and a special nod to the French repertoire. General Music Director Vladimir Jurowski conducts three of the programmes. Conductors raising their baton with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester for the first time will grace the podium with the other three. Shortly before his Academy Concert, Robin Ticciati, Principal Conductor of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and (as Vladimir Jurowski’s successor), Music Director of the Glyndebourne Festival, will conduct a performance series of Ariadne auf Naxos, and with Ein Heldenleben will also conduct another piece by Richard Strauss. And we can look forward to a rarely performed Jean Sibelius gem from him. With his concert, Stéphane Denève, a guest performer at the most important institutions around the globe, makes his Staatsoper debut, while also combining ballet suites by Francis Poulenc, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky. In the 2026/27 season, Edward Gardner – Music Director at the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo – who has already performed for Munich audiences with the premiere series of Peter Grimes, conducts another Britten opera (the Death in Venice festival production) and brings two more Parisian ballet music pieces to the concert – Paul Dukas’s La Péri and Igor Stravinsky’s Feuervogel. Two familiar guests return as first soloists: Frank Peter Zimmermann and Truls Mørk – the former with Paul Hindemith’s Violin Concerto, the latter with Camille Saints-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No. 1. Two young violinists from our own ranks, David Schultheiß, first concertmaster of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester, and Matjaž Bogataj, second violin principal, united in harmonious collegiality for a composition by Belgian violin virtuoso, Eugène Ysaÿe, which already announces the friendship in the title: Amitié for Two Violins and Orchestra. A living legend debuts with Mitsuko Uchida, when the Japanese pianist interprets Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 as the season commences. With his concerts, Vladimir Jurowski spans an arc across the season and bookends it with two Romance symphonies – in the 1st Academy Concert Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 3 and in the 6th Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 9. He will also conduct Arthur Honegger’s Symphonie liturgique, a harrowing indictment of war and a poignant expression of the desire for its permanent eradication.