Sommernachtskonzert Schönbrunn 2026
Summer Night Concert: Open-Air Concert on the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace

Suppé Leichte Kavallerie: Overture; Boito Mefistofele: Son lo spirito che nega; Puccini Manon Lescaut: Intermezzo; Verdi Falstaff: Ehi! paggio! … L’onore! Ladri! Tchaikovsky The Nutcracker: Trépak; Price Adoration; Korngold Straussiana; Wagner Das Rheingold: Abendlich strahlt der Sonne Auge; Massenet Thaïs: Méditation; Ravcel Daphnis et Chloé: Suite No. 2
Bock- Fiddler on the Roof: If I were a rich man. + encores

The Vienna Philharmonic, Lorenzo Viotti.
Sir Bryn Terfel, tenor & The Vienna Boys' Choir

Sony Classical 19958462019

The world's largest annual open-air classical concert needs no introduction, but Schönbrunn's Baroque park still supplies one every June: torchlit gardens standing in for a concert hall and a Viennese audience with the best seats in Europe. This year's instalment, recorded on 19 June, brought two Summer Night Concert debuts of consequence — Lorenzo Viotti on the podium and Sir Bryn Terfel as soloist, despite decades of prior collaboration with the orchestra. It hardly sounds like a first date.

Terfel's programme was a tour through operatic devilry and domestic devotion: arias from Boito's Mefistofele and Verdi's Falstaff, the finale of Wagner's Das Rheingold, and — least expected of the four — Tevye's "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof. You sense the actor in him before the singer; even through speakers, the characterisation carries. His account of Wotan's "Abendlich strahlt der Sonnenauge," as the gods process into their ill-gotten Valhalla, has the authority of a man who owns the room he isn't in — commanding, unhurried, entirely at home in music the orchestra clearly considers home turf too. Tevye, by contrast, is all warmth and comic timing, and Terfel judges the shift without ever letting the evening tip into pastiche.

Elsewhere, Tchaikovsky's Trepak arrives as a bracing shot of Cossack energy between the grander statements, while the Méditation from Massenet's Thaïs — absent from Philharmoniker programmes for over a century — is exactly as its title promises. Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2 is where the orchestra's sectional strengths get their proper airing: woodwind birdsong so vivid you can almost place yourself among the plane trees, closing on a daybreak that lingers in the memory long after the final chord.

Two encores sent the crowd home smiling: Zequinha de Abreu's Tico-Tico no Fubá, still cheerfully catchy nearly a century after Carmen Miranda made it famous, and the inevitable, irresistible Johann Strauss II Wiener Blut waltz. A summer night's concert, then, that survives the journey from Schönbrunn to your speakers rather better than most.