Belgrade Philharmonic puts Crescendo 26/27 on sale: Mahler, Berg and a Felc continuity
From June 2 to June 13, the Belgrade Philharmonic sells subscriptions for its next season, Crescendo 26/27, with twenty-five concerts under chief conductor Gabriel Felc and a roster of guests including Stanislav Kochanovsky, Daniel Raiskin and Howard Griffiths.
The current season closed two weeks ago with a concert titled “Hommage to Djindjic”. The Belgrade Philharmonic now enters its usual pause between May and September, the period when the orchestra does not perform but the subscriptions go on sale.
From June 2 to June 13, exclusively at the box office at Studentski trg 7, existing subscribers and new buyers can pick up the full catalogue of concerts for Crescendo 26/27. It is the first full season under the new concert brand the Philharmonic launched in 2024.
Crescendo’s structure is twenty-five concerts a year, which for a mid-sized national philharmonic counts as a respectable annual volume. The season runs from October to June, with a pause in December and January. Most concerts take place at Kolarac, with occasional appearances in the orchestra’s own hall or at the Sava Center for works requiring more space.
Felc as continuity
The conductor’s baton remains in the hands of Gabriel Felc. The German conductor came to the Belgrade Philharmonic in 2023 and has overseen what counts as a well-received handover from the previous era.
Felc’s career runs between Berlin, Dortmund and Bern. With the Belgrade ensemble he works mainly on Romantic and late-Romantic repertoire, with notable readings of Bruckner, Mahler and Strauss. That is not only a repertoire choice. It is a working stage through which the orchestra’s technical level is gradually being tested.
Alongside him, the season brings a serious gallery of guest conductors:
- Stanislav Kochanovsky, a Russian conductor with a career in Moscow and Prague, opens the season in October
- Daniel Raiskin, until last year chief of the Riga Philharmonic, arrives in January with a Baltic program
- Howard Griffiths, the British conductor specialised in Viennese classical repertoire, in March, with cellist Hieronymus Capps
- John Axelrod, the American conductor who has been leading the second subscription series for several seasons, in April
- Aleksander Bloch, a young French conductor noted in Brussels and Berlin, makes his Belgrade debut in February
- Christof Altstaedt, the Swiss conductor, also makes his first appearance, in March, with a Baroque program
What the subscription covers
A Crescendo 26/27 subscription covers all twenty-five concerts, which for the orchestra’s regular audience represents more than two-thirds of the season. Prices are arranged in three tiers, with an increase of around 5 percent over the previous season. Given current Serbian inflation, that counts as a steady hold on prices, especially in light of the mixed funding structure between national, provincial and own-source revenue.
Box-office-only sales, for a modern European orchestra, look anachronistic. The Philharmonic justifies the choice through its insistence on direct contact with the regular audience, a resource the ensemble argues it cannot afford to put at risk. Online sales open only in September, and only for individual tickets that remain after the subscription allocation.
A season as a canon
What a Philharmonic subscription season sets is the selection of works that will be heard. Crescendo 26/27 in that sense deserves careful reading:
- Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, with Felc
- Bruckner’s Seventh, with Raiskin
- a Shostakovich and Stravinsky program, with Kochanovsky
- a new opera production in concert performance, “Wozzeck” by Alban Berg
Berg’s “Wozzeck” is essentially a new experience for Belgrade audiences. The opera has not been performed in Serbia, staged or concertant, for more than thirty years, which for a single philharmonic season counts as a real event. The orchestra has not put on a concert opera often in the last decade; the previous one was “Carmen” in 2019.
There are also two recital programs of a kind that do not appear every year:
- pianist Maria Joao Pires, who last performed in Belgrade in 2002
- violinist Augustin Hadelich, making his Serbian debut in January
These two guests, even if not at the very top of current international lists, represent the kind of booking that for a national orchestra counts as high-level and that is not consistently available on the local market.
Can a season really be planned a year ahead?
The question that will surface during the subscription period is not rhetorical. Over the last five seasons, the Philharmonic has reshuffled its schedule for external reasons more than once, which has produced a measure of uncertainty among regulars.
Season 24/25 lost two concerts to guest cancellations, with one transferred to the following year. The Philharmonic itself acknowledges this reflects a wider situation rather than internal failure, but it still chips away at subscriber trust.
This season Felc held the rhythm with remarkable steadiness. Every concert he led arrived where it was supposed to, which is the professional metric that only becomes visible over time. It is not without reason that the next season is selling with solid expectations.
Crescendo 26/27 is worth the subscription for both the regular audience and those who only drop in. Mahler’s Sixth is not in Belgrade every year. Berg’s “Wozzeck” is not on offer every time we wish for it.
What do you think: should a philharmonic ensemble choose repertoire that tests its own level, or one that confirms the standard already reached?
