VERBIER FESTIVAL

The Verbier Festival is two and a half weeks of classical music in July in an Alpine village above the Val de Bagnes, in the Swiss canton of Valais: orchestral concerts and opera most evenings in the Salle des Combins, recitals and chamber music in the church, and some hundred masterclasses, free to anyone who books. The great soloists come back to it summer after summer. Its orchestra is made of players aged eighteen to twenty-eight, chosen by audition on five continents.

“Nobody comes here by mistake,” its founder has said. “You don’t happen to come to Verbier.”

The Founding

Martin Engstroem, a Swede, was an artists’ agent in Paris from 1975, and worked with Karajan, Böhm, Birgit Nilsson and Bernstein. As an agent, he said, he was always caught between the organiser and the artist, and he wanted the last word. In the early 1990s he skied at Verbier with his family and found a resort where everything worked and which emptied in summer, its chalets owned by people with no reason to come up in July. He began to put a festival together in 1991, and it opened in 1994.

The first summers were played in a tent at Médran, by the cable car. Evgeny Kissin, Zubin Mehta and Mischa Maisky came in the first year, and Maxim Vengerov finished his violin recital with the audience sitting on the stage. When Björk came to sing Schoenberg, Engstroem said, she wanted no fee, only a chalet and a mountain bike.

The orchestra followed in 2000, conducted first by James Levine and then by Charles Dutoit. Valery Gergiev, its music director from 2018, was asked to resign in February 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine. A junior orchestra, for fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds, and a chamber orchestra of former players have grown up beside it.

The tent served until 2009. Since 2010 the main hall has been the Salle des Combins, which seats 1,407 in tiers and is not a permanent building, though it is insulated and soundproofed like one. On its opening night a thunderstorm killed four cows and a power cut delayed the first concert.

The Festival

Evening concerts in the Salle des Combins begin at half past six. The church, which seats 430, has recitals in the morning, the afternoon and the evening. The masterclasses, for the young musicians of the Academy, are given in English, and anyone may book a seat. A festival within the festival gives free concerts in the village and on the mountain, among them open-air concerts in the meadow at La Chaux, at 2,260 metres. On the last afternoon the Academy’s young singers give a staged opera.

In 2026, its thirty-third summer, from 16 July to 2 August, it gave 236 concerts and events and issued more than fifty thousand tickets. Esa-Pekka Salonen opened it with Messiaen’s Turangalîla, Renée Fleming sang with the chamber orchestra under Lahav Shani on 1 August, and Evgeny Kissin and András Schiff played together.

What to Know

It runs for two and a half weeks from the middle of July to the first days of August: in 2027, to 1 August. Tickets go on sale on 23 November 2026, and to the festival’s Friends from 6 November.

Evening seats in the Salle des Combins cost up to 220 francs.

There is no dress code. Verbier stands at 1,500 metres and July nights fall to about seven degrees: a jacket, and a coat for the walk back.

From Geneva the train goes to Le Châble, changing at Martigny, in about two hours and forty minutes, and the gondola goes up from there; the last one down leaves just before midnight. The festival’s free buses run between the venues and after the concerts. Its partner hotels include the W and the Chalet d’Adrien.

The mistake is to treat a free masterclass as an open door. A seat must be booked, and a booked seat is held only until ten minutes after the start.

The Court

The Verbier Festival is not the Court’s own. Seats in the Salle des Combins and the church are sought on a member’s behalf from the day sales open in November, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in Verbier, and the table afterward.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.