Christmas gift ideas
Discover concerts that will be just the ticket to wow any classical music lover this Christmas.
1. A fan favourite
Symphonic Dances
Wed 19 Feb 2025 | Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall
You can’t go wrong with Rachmaninoff’s electrifying Symphonic Dances. It’s music that’ll have you on the edge of your seat. But first, whirl around the ballrooms of St Petersburg and hear Boris Giltburg take on Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, with a tune you’ll never forget.
2. Something to blow you away
An Alpine Symphony
Fri 21 Feb 2025 | Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall
Waterfalls, glaciers, an ear-splitting storm – spectacular isn’t the word for Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. No composer tells a story quite like Richard Strauss – or paints a picture in more fabulous sounds. So when he set out to depict the majesty of the Bavarian Alps, the results are … well, hear for yourself.
3. Something for opera lovers
An evening with Renée Fleming
Wed 5 Mar 2025 | Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall
When the star of the show is soprano Renée Fleming, you just know that something extra-special is on the cards. ‘Unforgettable’ was how one critic described her 2022 performance with the LPO, and tonight she returns to sing Richard Strauss’s radiant Four Last Songs – music that never grows old.
4. A musical blockbuster
Mahler’s Fifth
Wed 19 Mar 2025 | Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall
Mahler once said that music must be like the world. His Fifth Symphony is a blockbuster journey from darkness to light, told in funeral marches, Viennese waltzes and music’s sweetest love letter. 70 minutes of simply glorious music.
5. Family fun
FUNharmonics: The Snail and the Whale
Sun 23 Mar 2025 | Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall
Based on Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s beloved book, the Orchestra presents ‘The Snail and the Whale’, complete with Magic Light Pictures’s film on the big screen. It’s sure to be an unforgettable first concert experience for all the family.
6. Something completely different
Daphnis and Chloé
Wed 23 Apr 2025 | Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall
Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé is an orchestral masterpiece – a ballet that resists staging. Enter Circa’s powerful acrobatics and aerials. The collaboration between orchestra and gravity-defying circus teases out a world as intriguing, sensual and strange as the music itself with dramatic group acrobatics, intimate duos and aerial solos.