In what has been a dizzyingly eventful year, the classical music world continues to alter and transform in its own way. Bachtrack’s listings – of 31,455 distinct concert, opera and dance events – comprise the largest available snapshot of this world of live performance. It promises valuable insight into what orchestras, opera houses and dance companies are offering worldwide. Analysing this data, and looking back on 2025, what conclusions can we draw?
Click here to view our complete infographic, including top works, composers, conductors and soloists
Our listings document the activities of mainstream classical music organisations, predominantly in Europe and North America. As such, they provide insight into trends within these institutions at the core of the industry. This year, we are trying some novel analysis – looking in particular at how orchestras and performers are travelling. How internationally interconnected is the world of live performance documented by Bachtrack?
The jet set
In past years, we have frequently commented on the busyness of orchestras, conductors and performers, noting which orchestras presented the most concerts within a calendar year. Many orchestras perform exceptionally frequently – especially those linked to opera houses. And individual performers have their own preferred rhythm of engagements. In 2025, Yannick Nézet-Séguin tops our list of busiest conductors, with an amazing 120 listed engagements – and looking back over the last decade of data, Nézet-Séguin has been a consistent presence among the busiest.
*Busiest conductors includes performances in all genres: concerts, opera and dance. Orchestras are limited to concert performances only.
Other names in this year’s busy-list are similarly consistent – for instance Andris Nelsons, Paavo Järvi – joined in recent years by younger figures such as Klaus Mäkelä. With 83 listed performances, Simone Young is a notable entry into the top ten busiest conductors this year. The industry’s pressure on conductors and soloists to match these numbers is keenly felt. While we wouldn’t wish to fault conductors for their work ethic, it is perhaps worth stating for the record that sheer quantity is no inherent marker of quality.
This year we wanted to investigate a further aspect: who was travelling the most for engagements? At the top of the list, perhaps unsurprisingly given his double life as a conductor and airplane pilot, is Daniel Harding, who performed in a whopping 16 countries over the course of the year. Paavo Järvi, Iván Fischer and Myung-whun Chung were not far behind, appearing in 14 and 13 countries respectively. Among pianists, Jan Lisiecki matches Harding, appearing in 16 countries. Sir András Schiff, who just passed the age of 72, more than twice Lisiecki’s age, was close behind, visiting 15 countries.
European orchestras are similar in their distance travelled. The Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker and Budapest Festival Orchestra all visited 11 countries in 2025. Their raw number of total listed performances are notable too – 137, 132 and 100 respectively, including concerts in their home bases, though the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester outpaced them with 187, visiting 8 countries outside Germany.
Where are all these performers and orchestras going? Germany, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, France and the UK comprise the top six locations. This list has remained relatively consistent between 2016 and 2025 with one notable exception: in 2016, the United Kingdom appeared second only to Germany in welcoming the most visiting orchestras in Bachtrack’s listings. By 2025, the UK has dropped to sixth in the rankings, the number of touring ensembles declining from 82 to 50, now dwarfed by Germany’s 123 in the same year.
The drop is dispiriting for British music lovers. Austria, whose population amounts to about 13% of the UK’s, welcomed almost twice as many touring ensembles, 94 in total. When considered per head of population, Austria welcomed more than ten times as many visiting classical ensembles.
Bachtrack’s statistics capture predominantly European musical organisations on tour. But it’s not simply Brexit that has reduced the number of visiting musicians to Britain: those from outside Europe often face even steeper barriers in securing visas. It deprives British audiences of connectedness to the wider world, and is something the government should urgently work to correct.
A wider question is whether this level of internationalism is sustainable into the future. As arts organisations increasingly decarbonise their activities, will jetting around the world to a dozen or more countries in a year be reasonable? Some European orchestras conduct carbon-neutral tours, and possible distances are naturally more limited. Will the current level of internationalism decline as the 2020s continue?
Composers on the rise
In the last decade, we have seen a steady rise of Maurice Ravel in our listings. 2025 marked the composer’s 150th anniversary, so it is no surprise to see his pieces in among the most performed concert works, La valse and the Piano Concerto in G major both placing within the top five. (This year, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was the most performed concert work in our listings, potentially an artifact of a large number of performances by chamber orchestras we list.)
This year, Arvo Pärt was the most performed living composer in our listings, with orchestras and ensembles celebrating his 90th birthday. Over the last decade he has been a consistent presence among the most performed living composers. “During my father’s 90th year,” commented the composer’s son Michael Pärt, “what has stood out most for us is not only the scale of performances around the world, but the attentiveness with which audiences receive the music. Its continued presence points to a growing yearning for music with an inner, spiritual depth – music that can speak across cultures and act as a unifying force in an increasingly divided world.” We also note György Kurtág’s prominence among frequently performed living composers. Celebrating his 100th birthday in 2026, he is another consistent presence over the past decade.
Women composers have made significant gains over the past decade. In 2016, we observed only 7 women among the top 250 most performed composers, living and dead. By 2025, this had risen to 30 out of the top 250, with 8 among the top 100 most performed.
Living women composers have also increased significantly in prominence over the period, with Caroline Shaw and Anna Clyne both appearing in the top ten most performed living composers. In 2025 we also note an increasing prominence of composers of colour, with performances of Gabriela Ortiz almost doubling since 2024. Others increasing in prominence in the 2020s include US composers Jessie Montgomery and Carlos Simon, while South African composer-cellist Abel Selaocoe has shot to prominence in the last few years, with listed performances almost tripling between 2024 and 2025.
Between 2016 and 2025, we note a rough doubling of concert performance of music by living composers, from around 7% to almost 14%. In comparison, other musical periods have remained basically stable, with even a small decline in the percentage of performances of music of the Classical period (1750 to c.1810). This rise in contemporary music is most observable in the US and the UK, with European countries also rising, though in smaller proportions. (We have not yet noted any changes in programming habits of US performing arts organisations, despite recent political changes.)
We were also curious about composers who escape our notice. The classical music world in China is enormous, but outside of Hong Kong it is rarely captured by our listings. With 50 performances this year, Chinese composer Ye Xiaogang would place within the top 20 living composers, with performances by 26 ensembles across 8 countries and regions. Perhaps best known for his work Starry Sky which featured in the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, he is probably China’s most performed living composer of classical music. (This bespoke analysis was done in conjunction with Shanghai-based classical music journalist Rudolph Tang.) There are likely many other frequently performed composers around the world whose performances are not captured by our data, biased as it is towards Europe and North America.
Dance
It will come as no surprise to ballet audiences that The Nutcracker is still the most performed ballet in the world, clocking in at a staggering 693 performances in our 2025 listings. Alongside it, Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet and The Sleeping Beauty are consistently in the top four.
This year, there continues to be a distinct leaning towards anything by Matthew Bourne, with The Midnight Bell at 7th and The Red Shoes at 16th among the most performed dance works.
Other big dance events feature in the top 20, including Rambert’s Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby, late choreographer Paul Roberts’ Quadrophenia, ZooNation’s Ebony Scrooge and BRB’s Black Sabbath: The Ballet, all of which filled houses both in the UK and internationally.
Something of the unexpected turned up in the form of Blanca Li’s Le Bal de Paris, created for her company in 2018, proving popular in the years since. Born in Spain and now based in France, Li is a dancer, choreographer and film director. Le Bal is a multi-sensory, virtual-reality infused project that has shot her into 6th place among most performed choreographers – behind Petipa, Ivanov, Balanchine, Bourne and Forsythe.
Li has also leapt to the top spot of most performed women choreographers, ahead of Crystal Pite and Sharon Eyal, who made the top 20. Of the top 50 most performed choreographers listed, only 8 are women.
Conclusions
Revisiting Bachtrack’s annual statistics reports from over the last decade does make us consider what we – and the wider classical music world – most value. Increasing frequency of women composers, conductors and choreographers, as well as artists and composers of colour, are positives to be encouraged. But while prominence and frequency are helpful trend markers, performers’ busyness is not something to be valued inherently. As we note above, the industry places great pressure on performers to take on many engagements. How many is too many?
As the world fitfully transitions away from fossil fuels, will we see changes to the extent and frequency of international touring too? We noted with some amazement the sheer number of locations some performers visit in a calendar year – Daniel Harding’s jet-setting being particularly remarkable. But we also speculate whether our current era of internationalism may be something coming to an end quite soon.
