The London Philharmonic Orchestra announces 2025/26 London season exploring humanity’s bond with the natural world.
This Earth Day, the London Philharmonic Orchestra are proud to present details of Harmony in Nature, a new concert season for 2025/26 at the Southbank Centre. The season explores humanity’s bond with the natural world and issues a call to protect it – through the power of music that confronts, celebrates and inspires.
Season highlights include:
The opening concert on 27 September 2025 with a modern British masterpiece by the LPO’s new Composer-in-Residence: George Benjamin’s Ringed by the Flat Horizon. The evening’s programme also sees pianist Yefim Bronfman perform Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Piano Concerto No. 5, and Principal Conductor Edward Gardner lead Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5.
Contemporary voices throughout the season such as Gabriela Lena Franks’s Contested Eden (responding to wildfires), Gustavo Díaz-Jerez’s Tajogaite (volcanoes) and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s CATAMORPHOSIS (a sense of urgency driven by shifting polar forces) offer a contrasting reflection to the idyllic scenes of oceans, forests and mountains of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Sibelius.
The season also features seven-time Grammy Award-winning composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard, who, alongside his own jazz quintet, will perform the UK premiere of A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina) with the Orchestra.
An array of star guests includes legendary violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, pianists Yefim Bronfman and Alexandre Kantorow, soprano Jennifer France and baritone Stéphane Degout.
More guest soloists this season include pianists Paul Lewis, Anna Vinnitskaya and Pavel Kolesnikov, as well as violinists James Ehnes, Alina Ibragimova and Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider.
The LPO will perform 9 premieres across the season including (in London and Birmingham) Tan Dun’s Nine – an ‘ode to peace’ commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society as a companion piece to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in its 200th anniversary year.
LPO Principal Conductor Edward Gardner presents 'Phoenix Lands', a two-concert focus exploring his fascination of 20th-century composers from Central Europe.
The season closes on 25 April 2026 with a semi-staged performance of Berg’s harrowing opera Wozzeck, also conducted by Gardner. Principal Guest Conductor Karina Canellakis and Conductor Emeritus Vladimir Jurowski also take to the podium through the season.
Further Information: What's On - London Philharmonic Orchestra