Concerto Köln celebrates 40 years
Concerto Köln celebrates 40 years – and launches a ten-year project #WeCelebrate
In 2025, Concerto Köln looks back on 40 years of musical discoveries. To mark the anniversary, a celebratory concert will take place on October 28 at the Kölner Philharmonie, featuring a concert performance of George Frideric Handel’s opera Flavio, Rè di Longobardi, with distinguished companions including Julia Lezhneva and Max Emanuel Cencic in the leading roles.
On the occasion of its anniversary, the Cologne ensemble is also launching the series #WeCelebrate, a ten-year project highlighting each year composers, performers, and other historically significant figures of the Baroque era. The aim is to make music not only audible but also tangible – vibrant, engaging, and accessible to all.
For Concerto Köln, historically informed performance is more than a sonic reconstruction of the past: it is about understanding the conditions under which the music was created, meeting its companions, and grasping the challenges faced by composers. #WeCelebrate thus opens up exciting cross-references to pressing questions of our own time.
Concerto Köln celebrates 40 years of curiosity – and looks ahead. Historically informed performance is not a rearview mirror, but a headlight: it illuminates contexts, opens perspectives, and brings past and future into dialogue. What did war and peace mean then – and what do they mean today? How does this relate to migration? Can we actually hear it in the music? History and music come alive – they challenge, inspire, and move us in the here and now.
— Hannah Freienstein, Artistic Director, Concerto Köln
In its anniversary season, Concerto Köln will focus on Italian Baroque master Alessandro Scarlatti with several concerts in the Cologne region. The project will conclude in 2035: the anniversary year of the three great masters George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Domenico Scarlatti – and at the same time, Concerto Köln’s 50th anniversary. A circle completed.
Passionate music-making and an unwavering drive for discovery are Concerto Köln’s hallmarks. For almost 40 years, the orchestra’s distinctive sound has made it one of the leading ensembles in the field of historically informed performance. Deeply rooted in Cologne’s musical life and regularly invited to the world’s musical capitals and prestigious festivals, Concerto Köln stands for outstanding interpretations of early music.
Even familiar repertoire is interpreted in a way “so fresh and striking as if one were hearing it for the first time” (Die ZEIT). Performances are developed collaboratively after meticulous study of sources. Baroque and early Classical works are usually prepared under the direction of one of the concertmasters Evgeny Sviridov, Mayumi Hirasaki, Justyna Skatulnik, Markus Hoffmann, or Anna Dmitrieva, always with a focus on approaching the original sound of the works’ time of origin. This passion for the historical sound also underpins the ensemble’s long-standing collaborations with honorary conductor Kent Nagano and violinist Shunske Sato.
With the project Wagner-Lesarten, launched in 2018, Concerto Köln, together with Kent Nagano and an interdisciplinary team of scholars, explored the sound worlds of Richard Wagner and his contemporaries from the perspective of historically informed performance. The project culminated in 2021 with the preparation and performance of Das Rheingold. In 2022, in cooperation with the Dresden Music Festival and the Dresden Festival Orchestra under the artistic direction of Kent Nagano and Jan Vogler, The Wagner Cycles were launched, aiming to perform Wagner’s entire Ring des Nibelungen. In 2025, Siegfried was realized and presented on a major European tour.
Since 2008, the ensemble has been closely associated with the label Berlin Classics, while also recording for others. Its discography now includes over 75 recordings, many of them award-winning – including Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro under René Jacobs, which received a Grammy Award.
Since 2025, Concerto Köln has maintained a close cooperation with the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln, combining artistic practice, research, and education in new ways and providing fresh impulses for historically informed performance.
The work of Concerto Köln is supported by dedicated partners, including the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia, Kunststiftung NRW, the City of Cologne, and the Goethe-Institut. Since 2009, Concerto Köln has also enjoyed a close partnership with MBL Unique High End Audio, which enables the ensemble to engage intensively with sound aesthetics and reproduction quality.
For more on this, tune in to the WDR 3 Klassik Forum feature.