The Bayreuth Festival Orchestra will offer its first concert at the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville on September 2, under the direction of Pablo Heras-Casado. The gala will open the 2026/27 season of the theatre with a programme dedicated to Wagner.
The Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville will host the first concert of the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra in the Andalusian capital on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, at 20:00 hours. The event, which will take place in the Main Hall, will serve as the official opening of the 2026/27 season of the Seville coliseum.
The German ensemble, which annually brings together around two hundred musicians from German and international orchestras to perform the works of Richard Wagner, will be conducted by the Granada-born Pablo Heras-Casado. The conductor, who made his debut in Bayreuth in 2023 with Parsifal and has since returned to the festival, faces a new milestone in his career leading one of the most prestigious Wagnerian orchestras in the world.
The programme will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Bayreuth Festival, founded by Wagner himself in 1876. The first part of the concert will include excerpts from The Ring of the Nibelung, featuring pieces from The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, and Siegfried. Among the selected passages are the entrance of the gods to Valhalla, Wotan's farewell, and the murmuring of the forest.
The second part will be entirely dedicated to Twilight of the Gods, with Siegfried's dawn and journey along the Rhine, the hero's death, the funeral march, and Brünnhilde's final scene. For these performances, the orchestra will feature three prominent soloists: soprano Catherine Foster as Brünnhilde, tenor Klaus Florian Vogt in the roles of Siegmund and Siegfried, and bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee as Wotan.
The commemorative tour bringing the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra to Spain has been organised following the celebration of the 2026 edition in the Bavarian city. The festival's artistic director, Katharina Wagner, great-granddaughter of the composer, will accompany the ensemble during this tour, which kicks off on Saturday, August 29, at the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona and continues through Santander, Madrid, and Valencia, before arriving in Seville.
For the Seville audience, the evening represents an exceptional opportunity to hear live an orchestra created specifically for the interpretation of the Wagnerian repertoire, in a theatre that has been a regular venue for major lyrical and symphonic events. Tickets for the concert are already on sale on the Teatro de la Maestranza website and at the box office.
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