It takes a mountain: The hidden machinery behind the Verbier Festival

“Verbier is a dead end. Nobody comes here by accident.”

These are perhaps unusual terms in which describe one of the world’s largest, and most famed and acclaimed classical music festivals. Yet this observation from the Verbier Festival’s Founder and co-CEO Martin T:son Engstroem perfectly encapsulates the magic it has been working on audiences and artists since its inaugural 1994 edition – and also the logistical challenge in maintaining that magic year after year.

Some facts and statistics. Verbier sits at 1500m altitude on the east side of the Val de Bagnes, in Switzerland’s Valais canton. Look up, and it’s just the mountain ridge, pastures and birds that you’ll see. Look across, and it’s the Grand Combin massif. Breathe in, and the air is wonderfully pure – no doubt helped by the train line ending 20 minutes down the mountain, at Le Chable. Verbier itself has around 3000 year-round inhabitants. Come the ski season, this balloons to around 35,000, and while the summer sports season is smaller, it has been growing exponentially over the past decade, meaning accommodation and event space are at a premium that was not the case in 1994 – adding an extra element to what would already be a huge logistical undertaking even in a major city.

A Village Within a Village

Accommodation-wise, for instance, housing needs to be found over the festival period – and the three weeks preceding it – for 140 artistic staff (ramped up from a year-round team of 22), a 100-strong technical crew, 120 unpaid volunteers, and 218 members of the orchestras and Academy, plus their coaches and families. Come the actual festival period, and there’s the guest artists to accommodate, plus further festival guests such as the music industry professionals who flock to this huge annual gathering of major and rising artists. To give you a flavour, in 2024 the festival welcomed over 377 guest artists and booked 16,588 accommodation nights; and when these guests need collecting from the train station, and often also transport to the nightly post-concert dinners dotted around the resort (more of which later), peak days during the 2024 edition saw 80 to 90 rides being booked.

As for event space, while the main concert programme is split between the 1407-seat Salle de Combins and the church, the rest of the town (all decked up in Festival banners and giant deckchairs) and even the mountains play host to the scores of further concerts and events presented by the UNLTD fringe festival, and over 100 Academy masterclasses and events. Many of these, and all the orchestral rehearsals, are free-entry, which matters greatly to a festival as passionate about its welcome as its artistic quality. “I’ve always treated it like we are inviting the artists and the public to our home” says Engstroem. “A few years back I counted around 15,000 people who come to Verbier a couple of days just going to free events, not even buying tickets.” Although the box office staff are also kept more than busy, with tickets bought in 39,670 in 2024.

A Concert Hall Built from Scratch

The greatest logistical effort attached to the main venues is for the Salle de Combins, home since 2010 to the symphonic and operatic performances in particular. Built afresh each year, this temporary hall may look like a gigantic marquee, but is in fact a solid structure boasting 12cm-thick acoustically treated walls, and a similarly acoustically treated roof consisting of two layers separated by an air pocket, over which fine netting is suspended to break the speed – and thus, crucially, the sound – of any falling rain. “It’s a unique system that we developed ourselves with the help of acoustical engineers” says the festival’s Technical Director Erick Sez, who has been in his role ever since the festival’s very first edition. Not only does this hall take around 50 people a month to construct, but each year its construction is slightly different, as Engstroem and his co-CEO since 2024 Hervé Boissière dream up new ideas. This year, for instance, sees the addition of a pavilion where a new-look pre-concert interview series will take place; also a viewing room where festival-goers can watch performances from the Verbier Festival video archive on a wall-size screen. Sez’s planning, sourcing and safety-testing thus begins many months in advance, alongside tasks such as liaising with the artistic team to create the all-important technical riders, specifying each and every concert’s requirements as to stage set-up, equipment, sound and lighting. The challenge always at the back of his head? “Being on time with everything,” he says without hesitating. As for his driving force, ‘” like the music” he says simply. “We have the world’s top artists, and I have become friends with many over the decades”.

A memory from the Verbier Festival’s 25th anniversary and its uniquely special atmosphere.

Trains, Cable Cars, and a Green Vision

A similarly gargantuan logistical effort is booking the travel for the festival’s three resident orchestras with their respective orchestral coaches and their families, who arrive three weeks before the official festival period. Between themselves and the Academy musicians, 44 different countries are represented. This huge body of people, all travelling to Verbier at the same time from all around the world, has been a natural focus for VF Green, the festival’s sustainability initiative, the result of which is that, if it’s practically feasible, players and their coaches are encouraged to catch the train rather than fly. Those who do fly journey on from the airport now catch the train rather than being collected by coach. Then the final leg of the journey from Le Chable happens not by road but by cable car. “It’s a lot of train tickets, and then the cable car is complicated to organise,” smiles Orchestras Manager Sam Goldscheider, “but they arrive with a bigger smile on their face then they would after a two-hour winding coach journey with their instruments on their laps”. Goldscheider’s team isn’t begrudging this extra logistical element either, given how the effects of climate change on the Val de Bagnes’ fragile alpine ecosystem are increasingly impossible to ignore. Just this past June, road access to the village of Lourtier was cut off by a landslide, and in fact the festival will be literally going the extra mile for Lourtier’s inhabitants this year, with UNLTD making the village the destination of one of its guided “Ballade Musicale” hikes, performing a mini-concert there, while simultaneously raising festival-goers’ climate awareness. “Culture – especially music – has the unique power to connect people emotionally, spark reflection and inspire meaningful action” points out Marie-Jo Valente, President of the VF Green committee.

Recipes for Musical Alchemy

The 2025 Verbier Festival certainly has plenty of culture with which to spark reflections and emotions. With 70 main stage concerts and 14 UNLTD concerts alone across its 17 days, it’s bigger than ever before (there were 59 main stage concerts in 2024), and it’s no small job to programme all this, when Engstroem’s longstanding artistic credo for Verbier is that its artists don’t just play what they’re touring everywhere else, but allow themselves to be stimulated and have a difference made to their musical lives. Even the most illustrious artists are required to stay several days, performing around three concerts, with chamber music a key element; and always, they have to be prepared to take on something entirely new, whether that be a piece they’re playing for the first time, or be partnered for chamber music with colleagues they’ve never worked with before. It was in Verbier, for instance, that Yuja Wang was first paired with her now regular collaborators Leonidas Kavakos and Gautier Capuçon. Inevitably, these new musical marriages require immense trust in Engstroem on the part of the artists, and much thought and judgement on his own part. “It’s a little bit like being a chef in the kitchen,” he describes of the planning process. “I wait until a certain point, then I see what ingredients I have, and then I start cooking”. Simultaneously, he is looking for a repertoire balance that bears in mind that the average festival goer stays 6 days, and that hundreds of people return year after year. “I’m very much aware that the returning public want some familiarity,” he outlines, “but that it also has to be new”.

That’s certainly true even for 2025’s First Night, which sees Barbara Hannigan make her Festival debut conducting and singing with the Verbier Festival Orchestra, preceded by a pre-concert interview with Mischa Maisky, who has been coming every year since the festival’s foundation.

Back to hosting, and perhaps the most famous element of the Verbier Festival welcome for artists and those in the music industry is those aforementioned post-concert dinners. Taking place each night of the festival, many of them in private chalet homes, these are coordinated, hosted and financed by the Friends of the Verbier festival, itself an indispensable logistical, financial and moral support to the Festival ever since 1993. “I realised that lots of artists didn’t know other artists, so there was a social need,” explains Engstroem. “They also spend their life in restaurants, so the dinners are in chalets; and it’s a buffet so they don’t have to sit down next to somebody they don’t want to talk to. I’m not trying to raise money by them sitting next to a sponsor…”.  

What Happens When the Stage Comes Down

For one final sampling of Verbier’s logistical pie, you could do no better than look to medici.tv – something Boissière knows better than anyone, having founded medici.tv in 2008 (he moved on to become the VF’s co-CEO in 2024) precisely to bring Verbier’s concerts to a global audience, for free. Back then, and still today, the especially important logistical element was the timetabling of the production crew so as to create a working rhythm that, despite the huge volume of music being recorded (27 concerts in 2024), guards against directors falling into a tired rut. “It’s about make sure that the guys are always fresh and inspired enough to enter each concert as a new venture,” he emphasises. 

New ventures is in fact now very much where Boissière and Engstroem are now taking the festival, with its activities fast expanding across the rest of the year, from education initiatives in Verbier itself – where the festival is spearheading the creation of a brand new permanent concert hall and culture centre – to the growth of the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra’s international touring activities. 

“Art makes life better”, states Boissière, “and the Verbier Festival is, concretely, a piece of a game which helps create the connection between the artist and public – who need each other. Which is a responsibility, especially in this increasingly crazy world. I’m not saying that we are saving lives, but we contribute to make available something which is inspiring, necessary and beautiful. And this is what gets us out of bed every morning”. 

Certainly, if anyone can take an already-logistically-ambitious programme and make it even bigger, it’s the Verbier Festival: a team not simply building classical music’s biggest and most vibrant “dead end,” but one whose doors open wide out onto the world’s four corners. 

If you can’t make it to Verbier this summer, experience the 2025 Verbier Festival live from the Swiss Alps on medici.tv!