Crescendo ends in June, but the subscription is already on sale in June

When chief conductor of the Belgrade Philharmonic Gabriel Felz raised his baton last October at the opening of the Crescendo season, ahead of a performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, the Kolarac hall was full to a level rarely seen at the orchestra outside the new-year gala. The fifteen-month season, with a programme of twenty-five concerts at Kolarac, the Sava Centre and the Synagogue in Veliki Beckerek, now enters its final third, with the closing concert announced for 27 June, when Bruckner’s Ninth and the European premiere of a new composition by the domestic author Vladimir Tosic will be performed.

The season the Philharmonic named Crescendo was thematically focused on works that have functioned as stylistic or generic turning points in music history, with standard concerto and symphonic works grouped around discontinuity and premiere performances. The conducting line, alongside Felz, was carried by guest conductors Michael Sanderling, Ana Patricia Calvelo and Jamie Phillips, while the soloist line was carefully balanced: on the stand through the season were violinists Christian Tetzlaff and Sergei Khachatryan, cellists Pablo Ferrandez and Torleif Thedeen, pianists Jan Lisiecki, Alexei Volodin and Yeol Eum Son, hornist Stefan Dohr and harpist Xavier de Maistre.

In March, the Philharmonic performed a specially conceived concert dedicated to the memory of Zoran Djindjic, given on the twenty-third anniversary of his assassination, at which the audience heard Aleksinski’s Liturgy and Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, two works the house already knows from the Ivan Tasovac Season programme of 2021. The revival of The Soldier’s Tale, a piece Tasovac was particularly fond of, was done to renew the template of a particular intimate evening that at Kolarac leaves a different impression from the large symphonic programmes.

What Crescendo says about the state of the house

With twenty-five concerts, Crescendo compares with the Philharmonic’s programmes over the previous ten seasons, where the number of public performances has varied between twenty-one and twenty-eight. That means the house, despite continuing budget pressure and the fact that in 2025 it was temporarily without a director following the sudden resignation of Ivana Lazovic, has managed to maintain the level of activity expected of a national philharmonic institution. Felz, who took over as chief conductor in 2022, said in his mandate address to the Philharmonic Council in January that the programme plan for 2026/2027 is “finalised to a level that allows subscription sales before the public announcement of the repertoire”, a formulation that sounds institutional but in practice means one thing: the house is confident of its plan but not ready to share it with the public before securing subscription revenue.

Subscription package sales for existing subscribers will run from 2 to 13 June exclusively at the Belgrade Philharmonic box office, while for new subscribers packages will be on sale from 16 to 27 June, both at the counter and online. Individual concert sales open on 30 June. With subscription prices ranging from twenty-eight thousand dinars for balcony seats to one hundred and ten thousand for front stalls, the house’s financing model increasingly leans on own revenue, with the share of state funding falling over the past five years from eighty-five to seventy-three per cent.

What is interesting for the audience in the coming season, even before the schedule is published, is that the house has already confirmed off the record a guest appearance by the philharmonic chorus of the Vienna Staatsoper in October, and a concert at which the complete Mahler Eighth, the Symphony of a Thousand, will be performed at the Sava Centre next March. This would be the first performance of the piece in Serbia since 1989, when the Philharmonic under Imre Tepli performed Mahler at the old Kolarac hall, which carries historical weight for audiences that follow the house’s programming.

The end of Crescendo is therefore the end of one seasonal narrative, but opening subscriptions before the public announcement of the new repertoire is a gesture that is not happening for the first time and remains a matter of discussion among subscribers. The exact date on which the next season will be presented at a public conference has not been disclosed, but the house is expected to announce it between 1 and 10 September.