Concert for Milan 2026: the Filarmonica della Scala in Piazza Duomo with Riccardo Chailly and Hayato Sumino
The orchestra performs for free under the stars with 5000 seats, offering a programme ranging from Rachmaninov to Gershwin and Bernstein, broadcast live by Rai Cultura
Saturday 13 June 2026 at 9 p.m. sees the return of Concerto per Milano, the great free open-air event of the Filarmonica della Scala in Piazza Duomo, organised together with Main Partner UniCredit, Sponsor Allianz and Esselunga, and the patronage of the City of Milan. The orchestra leaves La Scala to perform in the city's symbolic location, amidst the historic palazzi and the splendid Gothic façade of the Duomo for the thirteenth edition of the concert that opens Milan's cultural summer. This year the Piazza is transformed into a large auditorium under the stars with 5,000 seats available to the public free of charge.
As per tradition, the concert will be conducted by principal conductor Riccardo Chailly, while Japanese pianist Hayato Sumino makes his Philharmonic debut. The record-breaking pianist, only thirty years old, has built up an extraordinary global presence by combining interpretative rigour and a new approach capable of reaching different audiences, from the Carnegie Hall concerts to the eighteen thousand spectators at the K Arena in Yokohama, which has entered the Guinness Book of Records, to the two million people who follow him on his social channels such as Cateen.
The history of Concerto per Milano is inextricably linked to Riccardo Chailly, on the podium for twelve of the thirteen editions. Each year the appointment in Piazza Duomo represents the crowning achievement of the orchestra, which under the principal conductorship of Riccardo Chailly has given 120 concerts abroad out of the more than 200 conducted by the Maestro since 1991. Concerto per Milano has also conquered an ever-growing audience thanks to its television broadcasts abroad.
Seating availability is exhausted: it will only be possible to reserve seats at www.filarmonica.it should they become free. It will still be possible to attend the concert without a reservation by standing room only. As was the case in 2020, the stage will be placed in front of the parvis, guaranteeing everyone the best view of the concert: the profile, the spires and the monumental façade of the Cathedral will be the natural setting for an extraordinary evening of music for everyone.
In the programme, 20th century music becomes a tale: from Russian opera to the American musical, distant sound worlds follow a single expressive arc and are found in that ironic taste deeply rooted in the popular world. Two selections of dances, as distant geographically as they are equally pressing in rhythm, frame the programme: at the opening those from Sergei Rachmaninov's early opera Aleko, at the close two of the famous symphonic dances from Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story. At the heart of the programme is a page imbued with metropolitan energy: George Gershwin's famous Concerto in F major for piano and orchestra is a masterpiece that fuses symphonic language and jazz, one of the most successful examples of the encounter between cultured music and early 20th century American culture. The music that Dmitrij Šostakovič wrote for the animated film Story of the Priest and his Workman Balda, based on a fairy tale by Pushkin, is rich in invention and waiting to be discovered.
