Big birthdays: Philharmonia Orchestra celebrates 80 years in 2025–26

The 80th anniversary of VE-day was celebrated this year, with full military pomp and circumstance. It’s no coincidence that the Philharmonia Orchestra celebrates its birthday in the same year, since its founder Walter Legge created the orchestra by recruiting the cream of British musicians from ENSA, the organisation which provided entertainment for the armed forces, of whose music division he was in charge.

The torch of a history rich in memorable concerts and classic recordings has now passed to Thorben Dittes, who became CEO in 2022. His tenure started with the fraught job of steering the orchestra out of the Covid pandemic, but with that largely behind us, Dittes has been able to turn his attention to the happier task of planning the celebratory 2025–26 season.

“A birthday season is always something special,” Dittes says when we speak by video call this month. “When I joined, there were some initial ideas already in place, especially around featured artists and composers – classical music is planned three years out, so it’s not something you do overnight. What was important to me is that we should mark the history of the orchestra, its achievements, what makes it special. At the same time, we also use this opportunity to connect with wider issues in society.”

“This is something I feel very strongly about: orchestras live in the real world,” Dittes emphasises. “They may be playing a lot of music from the past, but that doesn’t mean that orchestras cannot connect their work to the human experience and the issues of our time. That does not always mean commissioning a composer to write a piece about any of the ongoing conflicts, for instance, because many of the key themes of our world were there in previous generations. Through programming, you can definitely bring the great composers and their thoughts and feelings and music to bear on topics of our time.”

Before we discuss artists and concerts, Dittes is keen to talk about those connections. It’s all too easy, he says, for a birthday season to be “a navel-gazing exercise” in which an orchestra looks at its past in a way that’s only of interest to its closest followers. He prefers to use “the lens of identity”, with the question of identity being currently rather fraught. “This is a good opportunity to look at areas such as gender, sexuality, politics, belief, all the major defining aspects of identity, and see how composers and artists have faced them at different points in history. So we have curated a series of concerts and have a very clear angle on this as part of the anniversary season.”

For the second season running, the Philharmonia will host a series of debates. “We will have people of opposing views meeting the audience. It’s not just a pre-concert talk, it’s not people lecturing. These different speakers will be presenting their views and provoking ideas, then the audience at tables will debate with each other and feed back to the stage. This interactive aspect links the programming and themes of the event to the contemporary world and brings audiences into the discussion. To me, that is a really important way in which we as orchestras can be part of contemporary society.”

There will also be post-concert talks, which are particularly well attended when the artists are involved – Dittes mentions Marin Alsop, their current Principal Guest Conductor, as having been particularly strong in this area. “I think that’s the way you generate context, so that people who are not of the core classical audience can relate to something that connects with their lifestyle.”

The 80th birthday agenda includes various plans which feature the number “80”, including a major audience development effort entitled Philharmonia Social, which Dittes describes as “a set of activities aimed at creating a first timer’s journey that is interactive and engaged, with ‘social’ being the key point. We’re recruiting 80 volunteers over the summer, and at each of the main season concerts, there will be 80 free tickets for first timers. So if you’ve not been before, you can get a free ticket for a phenomenal show and you will be met by people.”

“It’s using personal interaction to proactively break down the barriers that people feel when they come to a concert,” Dittes says. “Very often, the music on stage is not the thing that people actually find difficult.” The social aspects are not only important to first timers: noting how many more single concertgoers there have been following the Covid pandemic, Dittes also has plans for the intervals and after concerts to build networks of people with common musical interests.

For all the focus on the future and new audiences, the anniversary wouldn’t be complete without a solid dose of reflection on all that illustrious history. That started last March with a Verdi Requiem with Riccardo Muti, whose ten year tenure as Chief Conductor, in the 1970s, was highly significant to the orchestra after a turbulent period in its history. To close the birthday season, the current incumbent, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, will be “recreating” one of the orchestra’s big moments, “the only Philharmonia concert Richard Strauss ever conducted, which is a massive extravaganza, a very long concert which took some organizing! Santtu loves Strauss and there are two or three works in there that are new to him.” The autumn will also feature Strauss’ Four Last Songs, whose world premiere in 1950 was performed by the orchestra with Kirsten Flagstad and Wilhelm Furtwängler.

The season will feature other distinguished conductors with long-standing associations with the orchestra. Jakub Hrůša will conduct Mahler 7, Esa-Pekka Salonen will be doing Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, “which is one of his favourite things. We wanted to make sure that artists with whom we have a long relationship are coming with something which they really feel is them and exemplifies that relationship. But also, there are things that are new and different. Sir Donnald Runnicles is a fairly new relationship, but we wanted to have a big Bruckner symphony in the year, and who better to conduct a Bruckner 8?”

I can’t resist asking Dittes to compare and contrast the very different personalities that are Rouvali and his predecessor Salonen. “They’re different generations. Esa-Pekka is 67 now, and Santtu is just shy of 40, so they could be father and son. They are both from Finland; they both like a lot of the 20th-century repertoire, although they don’t necessarily cross over too much, other than in Finnish music. Esa-Pekka is a musician based in the modernist world; as a composer, he’s very much someone of those traditions, with his relationship with other major composers such as Saariaho or Lindberg. He has great interest in digital innovation, he’s a serious artist and the orchestra is proud that our long association with him continues.”

“Santtu is a very different beast,” Dittes muses. “His core repertoire includes more of the Romantic tradition. And in his music making – maybe this is an age differentiating factor – he sees himself as one of the musicians. He has the authority of the conductor, but he wants to make music with the orchestra, rather than being a person who stands at the front and sets the agenda. I think that has created a different dynamic: the musicians overwhelmingly voted to have him as their Chief Conductor, and they love working with him in that collaborative atmosphere.”

Alsop will also be very much involved in the celebrations. She will conduct the orchestra at Carnegie Hall, performing Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, one of two dates at the venue and a part of the orchestra’s US tour from 17th–29th October this year. It is an echo of another slice of history: back in 1955, the Philharmonia celebrated its 10th birthday at Carnegie Hall in their first US tour, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, then “another young man with wild hair”. Back in London, a fun and intriguing prospect from Alsop will be Laura Karpman’s opera Balls, a retelling of the 1973 Battle of the Sexes tennis match in which Billie Jean King struck a major blow for gender equality – a story that speaks precisely to the focus on issues of identity.

The season offers much else besides. Dittes rattles through other high profile artists and initiatives too numerous to list exhaustively: Vikingur Ólafsson, Gabriela Ortiz, Fazıl Say, trips to the Concertgebouw and the Musikverein,  and more. He also points at the orchestra’s Virtual Reality work as an important education tool, particularly for people unable to come to concerts (“We used it in Mauritius last year in our first festival there, in an island that had never seen an international symphony orchestra”).

I ask Dittes for his assessment of the orchestra’s current position and of the state of music generally. “Of course, as its CEO, I would say that the Philharmonia is the top orchestra in London. But I think any of the London orchestras have days where they’re the top orchestra in London and then other days when maybe they are not. And recruiting musicians has not become easier since Brexit. The UK market is an unusual one in that the musicians are freelance, which means that most do other things outside the orchestra.” Since Brexit, he explains, the challenges of immigration status have added to that burden, something which Dittes is lobbying hard to reduce in his role on the board of the Association of British Orchestras. “But I believe, at the same time, that the orchestras here are uniquely resourceful, that they thrive on innovation. They know they need to innovate in order to thrive and survive.”

The Philharmonia Orchestra’s 80th season begins 23rd September 2025.

See more about the Philharmonia’s 80th anniversary season.

This article was sponsored by Philharmonia Orchestra.