International Concert Series at The Bridgewater Hall

30 years in and The Bridgewater Hall’s International Concert Series hasn’t run out of world to draw from. The 2026-27 season brings orchestras from Germany, Ukraine and Japan to Manchester, takes in nine centuries of music, and finds room for a recent Ivor Novello Award-winner, a 5½-hour Wagner epic, and a visit that comes with an incredible local story.

That visit arrives in June 2027, when the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra makes its Manchester debut with Tadaaki Otaka conducting and Viktoria Mullova taking the solo role in Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto. Manchester and Osaka go back further than you might expect – in 1865, students from Satsuma secretly travelled here to study the machines of Cottonopolis, accelerating Japan’s textile revolution and helping Osaka become the ‘Manchester of the East.’ Recently, that legacy has been picked up again: last September, Greater Manchester and Osaka formalised the 160-year relationship with a Sister City Agreement. The Philharmonic’s concert follows the Hallé’s own trip to Osaka last year – a reminder of the diplomatic role music can play.

Backtracking a little, the season opens with a programme that sets a deliberately contemplative tone. Harry Christophers and his acclaimed choir The Sixteen trace nine centuries of choral music in Angel of Peace, from Hildegard of Bingen through to Arvo Pärt and a recent commission: Anna Clyne’s Orbits, which won the 2025 Ivor Novello Award for Best Choral Composition. Written specifically for The Sixteen, it sets Rilke’s poem ‘I Live My Life in Growing Orbits’. Clyne, a London-born composer now based in New York, was named the most performed living woman composer in the world in 2025.

German orchestras follow in the autumn, with the NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover under Stanislav Kochanovsky pairing Beethoven and Brahms with pianist Ingrid Fliter, and the Stuttgart Philharmonic bringing Jeneba Kanneh-Mason for Mendelssohn, Mozart and Brahms.

For the first time, Manchester’s own BBC Philharmonic joins the International Concert Series – a reminder that world-class classical music isn’t only something Manchester imports. Simone Young conducts Strauss’s monumental An Alpine Symphony in December, one of the largest works in the orchestral repertoire and a statement of intent for the orchestra’s series debut.

Beethoven is a returning thread, and for good reason – 2027 marks 200 years since the composer’s death. The BBC Philharmonic mark the anniversary in March under Anja Bihlmaier with the Ninth, paired with John Adams’s Absolute Jest, which weaves fragments of Beethoven’s late string quartets into something new, and Pauline Oliveros’s Tuning Meditation, a work about listening itself. It’s a programme that thinks about what Beethoven means rather than simply performing him. The anniversary thread culminates in Angela Hewitt’s all-Beethoven recital in May – five sonatas including the ‘Tempest’, the ‘Pathétique’ and the late Op. 110.

Other highlights include the Ukrainian National Philharmonic, whose programme in March pairs Beethoven’s Seventh with the Manchester premiere of Ivan Nebesnyy’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors – a suite drawn from Ukraine’s own Romeo-and-Juliet story. Opera North’s new staging of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde — directed by Peter Mumford, who helmed the company’s ambitious Ring Cycle – has its world premiere at the Bridgewater Hall in May. Wagner called it frightful and feared it would drive people mad. At over five hours, you can see why. And the series closes with trumpeter Matilda Lloyd and the Goldmund Quartet in Salon Reimagined, a programme that reaches back to the 19th-century salon to include music by pioneering female composers Marianna Martines and Pauline Viardot alongside Bach, Schubert and Gershwin.

At the ripe old age of 30, the International Concert Series is still forging connections across borders and across centuries. Long may it continue.