Thursday’s Summer Night Concert (14 May) from Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace will be broadcast in more than 30 countries as part of Eurovision’s exclusive 5-year distribution agreement with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (VPO).

The concert, one of three available annually to EBU Members in a deal that runs until 2017, is produced by Austrian EBU Member ORF in cooperation with the VPO.

The high definition recording is available globally on the EBU’s Eurovision and Euroradio satellite and fibre networks for live or deferred broadcast.  

The 90 minute concert will be led by world renowned conductor Zubin Mehta and feature piano soloist Rudolf Buchbinder and music from Richard Strauss, Carl Nielsen, Edvard Grieg, Jean Sibelius, Hans Christian Lumbye and Johann Stauss. An estimated 100,000 music lovers attend the concert free of charge in the UNESCO world cultural heritage-listed palace gardens.

EBU head of media Annika Nyberg Frankenhauser says the EBU is proud to be the medium through which the event is distributed globally.

“Ours is the only network anywhere that weds satellite and fibre in a dedicated, fully-managed environment, making us the trusted medium for reliable and cost-effective production and delivery of sports, news and music content to the world's media organizations,” Ms Nyberg said. “For millions of Europeans and indeed, audiences around the world, the EBU community is the go-to provider for these much anticipated events.”

A three-concert package

The Summer Night Concert is the second of three annual concerts that make up the 5-year TV, radio and online distribution agreement with the VPO.  

The first concert to be broadcast each year is the internationally popular New Year’s Day Concert from the Musikverein concert hall, Vienna, which this year attracted an audience of more than 50 million people worldwide.

The third element in the 2015 package is a special concert relayed from different international locations each year. This year’s concert will be a coproduction edited for deferred broadcast from two locations, Copenhagen (DR, Denmark) and Helsinki (YLE Finland) marking the 150^th anniversary of two celebrated Scandinavian composers, Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius.