2023/24 – That’s a wrap!
Thank you for joining us across our 2023/24 Season!
Over 80,000 people heard the Philharmonia play live in London, Bedford, Leicester, Canterbury, and Basingstoke. Our audiences are thriving, and the average attendance is the highest on record.
Our Principal Conductor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, and our Featured Artist, Nicola Benedetti, performed with us in all our UK residencies.
At The Marlowe in Canterbury, we sold out three times, including ‘Philharmonia Brass at Christmas’, where we performed on the panto set!
Plus our free programming welcomed more than 8,000 people through the doors.
Our digital footprint is bigger than ever
We made 23 films for our online channels, including filmed interviews with conductor Marin Alsop, sarod player Soumik Datta, composer Bryce Dessner, and pianist Bruce Liu. Plus, we launched our Maintaining Music strand.
Over 22 million people played more than 163 million tracks across 183 countries on our online music streaming channels.
Over 1 million watched Frank Dupree’s encore of Duke Ellington’s ‘Caravan’ on TikTok, making it our most viral piece of content.
And we were joined by even more people online, all over the world!
We brought the joy of classical music to thousands of kids across London, Bedford and Leicester
Almost 3,000 children took part in Orchestra Unwrapped, learning about the orchestra and preparing a song in school, then hearing us perform live – and singing with us too.
Plus, Hear and Now, our unique musical collaboration between older people living with dementia and their carers, young singers and instrumentalists from grassroots community organisations, reached its 14th Birthday!
Our Principal Conductor brought out the drums
Santtu played the drum kit in the first ever performance by the Philharmonia Big Band, as part of our American music series Let Freedom Ring.
The concert featured our Principal Guest Conductor Marin Alsop and The Marcus Roberts Trio for an unforgettable performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.
We went on a whistle-stop train tour of Europe and gave the world’s first public performance at Beijing’s Performing Arts Center.
Our Principal Conductor, Santtu, was joined by pianists Bruce Liu and Rudolf Buchbinder as we traveled to legendary venues, from Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw to Vienna’s Musikverein.
We performed the first public performance in Beijing’s Performing Arts Center, in a tour across China with conductor Lan Shui.
We created a festival in Mauritius for the first time
In January we were the first professional symphony orchestra ever to perform in Mauritius, joined by a Mauritian choir – dodging a tropical cyclone on the way!
We took the Orchestra to you!
Our musicians have played in a pub, a hair salon, a library, a museum, a multi-storey car park and the American Embassy – and most recently in an ancient Greek amphitheatre.
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What was your favourite moment of the 2023/24 season? And what are you looking forward to most in 2024/25?