SEASON 25|26 ›WONDERLAND‹
Dear audience,
75 years of the Munich Chamber Orchestra – almost an entire human life…
We are delighted to be celebrating this wonderful anniversary with you in the 2025/26 season! And looking back on the history of the MKO, we feel that we have good reason to be truly exuberant.
The development from a traditional string orchestra, born out of the spirit of the post-war years, to a self-responsible, curious, creative modern chamber orchestra of international calibre with a unique structure is something that fills us with pride on such an occasion. This evolution is only possible because we are constantly addressing a series of questions: How do we deal with “historical” music, what ever new insights and ideas are there in terms of performance practice in the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods and how do we transport these into our present day? How can we integrate this into the field of tension of our cross-epochal programmes? How can we help to carry music into the future by constantly engaging with contemporary compositions? How do we manage to lead you, dear audience, into the most contrasting worlds again and again and take you with us? And at this point, we are slowly approaching the idea behind our title for the coming season: WONDERLAND.
This anniversary season, we are continuing our collaboration with our three Associated Conductors.
Jörg Widmann
Bas Wiegers
Enrico Onofri
With reference to Unsuk Chin’s opera ‘Alice in Wonderland’, from which the piece ‘Puzzles and Games’ will be performed in the subscription concert in November, we would like to explore parallel worlds, escapes from the world, the creation of new spheres and question the role of music.
There is no doubt that music, perhaps the most immediate of all the arts, has the power to catapult people into other spheres and worlds in one single stroke. You arrive at a concert after a hard day’s work, and before you know it, the sun is rising with Haydn as an introduction to a new work with the title ‘No templates’, and you end up in childhood memories of religious awakenings. We find ourselves in the ancient realm of the god of the north wind, we are involved in the creation of new worlds and are transported to Maramures, in the north-eastern Carpathians. We all have experienced first-hand what the irrepressible power of Beethoven or the infinite genius of Mozart can do to us.
Parallel worlds are perhaps more present and available in our everyday lives nowadays than ever before. The need to immerse ourselves in them is obviously huge and the escape from the real world is extremely tempting. Social media, virtual worlds and digital networks are ever-present, as is the ‘I can make the world the way I like it’ attitude. And sometimes you rub your eyes when you look at reality and wonder whether all of this is actually true. Isn’t it incredibly soothing to let music take you to a “wonderland” that eludes all these normative assertions of reality by seeming to follow its very own laws – and to surrender to it, to “let your soul dangle”? But is that really all there is to it? What role does music play in this increasingly complex world, in which simple answers are experiencing a very dangerous boom in political discourse? Is it really just an entertainment luxury – superfluous in serious cases? Or is this “wonderland” that takes place on a successful evening in the concert hall not also a necessary, important, resistant objection to the divisions, distortions and normative settings that we are otherwise expected to accept as increasingly self-evident?
Music reflects the world in which we live in its very own way, it leads us into fantastic worlds, into utopias, into spiritual, light, pure spaces, into dark, lonely halls, into fields full of light-heartedness, lightness, pleasure and paradoxes. It is one of the bridges that brings us together in an empathic sense. But above all, music always leads us directly to ourselves, with everything that makes up our humanity!
With this in mind, we wish you, dear audience, and us a wonderful, fulfilling 2025/26 anniversary season.
Your Münchener Kammerorchester
Artistic Committee: Yuki Kasai, Daniel Giglberger, Florian Ganslmeier, Philipp Ernst, David Schreiber, Nancy Sullivan
ORDER SEASON BROCHURE
Our detailed season brochure will be published in May. If you would like to receive a printed copy of the season brochure free of charge, you can register now using our form. You will then receive the brochure hot off the press by post.
