The Ravello Festival 2026, music above the Amalfi sea

At a quarter past five on the morning of 11 August, an orchestra tunes up on a terrace that seems to hang off the edge of the Amalfi Coast, and the sun comes up over the Gulf of Salerno to meet it. The Concerto all'Alba is the reason most people learn the name Ravello, the town where the pink walls of Palazzo Avino hang above the same water, and the 2026 edition is already sold out. It is also only one night in a season that runs from 4 July to 5 September, the 74th the festival has staged in the garden of Villa Rufolo.

Wagner climbed up here in May 1880 and wrote in the hotel guestbook that he had found Klingsor's magic garden, the setting for the second act of Parsifal. The stage still sits where that garden falls away to the sea, cantilevered over the drop. Here are the five nights we would build a trip around.

1. The Concerto all'Alba, 11 August at 05:15. The one that sells out first. The Giuseppe Verdi Orchestra of Salerno, under Alessandro Palumbo, plays Bizet's two Carmen suites as the light comes up over the gulf. Doors open in the dark and the seats fill from the front. Miss the ticket and the town wakes with you anyway.
2. Kent Nagano and the Dresdner Festspielorchester, 31 July. An all-Wagner programme on the ground that inspired Parsifal, about as close to a home fixture as this music gets. Nagano brings a Dresden band on period-minded instruments to the garden that started the whole Wagnerian habit here.
3. Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, Philippe Jordan conducting, 29 August. Founded by Claudio Abbado in 1986, the orchestra draws the best young players in Europe and plays with a hunger the established houses can lose. Loud, precise, and worth staying up the coast for.
4. John Eliot Gardiner and his Constellation Choir and Orchestra, 30 August. The English conductor who spent decades rethinking how Bach and Beethoven should sound arrives with the ensemble he built after parting from the Monteverdi group. Historically informed, and unlikely to be quiet.
5. Freiburg Baroque Orchestra with Simon Rattle and Isabelle Faust, 5 September. The finale. Rattle steps away from the big symphonic machines to conduct one of the sharpest period bands in Europe, with Faust on the violin. A last night before the terrace goes dark for the winter.