Beethovenorchester

The Beethoven Orchester Bonn is the driving force of music life in the city of Bonn. The orchestra performs more than 70 concerts and participates in around 100 nights at the municipal opera house each year. Our mission is the ongoing quest for young fiery spirit in the city of Beethoven's bithplace - and spreading this spirit around the people.

In addition to working with international soloists such as Holly Hyun Choe, Karsu, Eímear Noone, Olga Pashchenko,
Lise de la Salle, Esther Schweins, Götz Alsmann, Gábor Boldoczki, Matthias Brandt, Daniel Müller-Schott and Sergei Nakariakov, the focus of the work is on the development of historical repertoire in the Hofkapelle series, on intercultural projects and participatory and educational concerts. Unusual concert formats have been tried out and lively and contemporary ways of communicating artistic content have been sought together with cooperation partners such as the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, the University of Bonn, the Bonn Theatre and Deutsche Telekom AG.

In the past, the orchestra’s work has been exemplified by extraordinary concert projects and various prize-winning recordings, such as the opera Irrelohe by Franz Schreker. The first joint production of the Beethoven Orchester Bonn with Dirk Kaftan, Beethoven’s Egmont, was highly praised by critics and awarded the OPUS KLASSIK in 2020. In 2021, the Beethoven Orchester Bonn recorded the CD Alles Tutti! together with the Kölsch rock band Brings under the direction of Dirk Kaftan.

The orchestra’s history dates back to 1907, when the Beethoven city got an orchestra again after the dissolution of the court orchestra in 1794. Conductors such as Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Dennis Russell Davies, Marc Soustrot and Kurt Masur established the orchestra in the top class of orchestras in Germany. Since the beginning of the 2017 / 2018 season, the Beethoven Orchester Bonn has been under the direction of Before that, Stefan Blunier and Christof Prick were in charge.

Successful concerts and guest performances far beyond the borders of Germany contributed to the orchestra’s good reputation. During the Corona pandemic, the orchestra musicians were involved in various social areas: they performed concerts in their free time in front of and in senior citizens‘, nursing homes and children’s homes, helped run the Bonn Vaccination Centre and streamed numerous concerts. In addition, various digital formats for children, students and adults were created to bring hope and joy through music during the »shutdowns«.

At the beginning of 2021, the Beethoven Orchestra was appointed as a United Nations Climate Change Goodwill Ambassador by the UN Climate Change Secretariat (UNFCCC). This enables the orchestra to develop new forms of sustainable cultural work in the spirit of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals together with the Climate Secretariat. In the summer of 2021, the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn was awarded the European Cultural Prize for, among other things, »its participatory concepts and the ambition to set out for new musical shores with the audience and its namesake Beethoven«.