★ Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad

01Why it matters

The Saanenland now has two festivals and they do different jobs. The Menuhin Festival fills seven summer weeks and needs a tent to hold its audiences; Sommets Musicaux fills nine winter days and refuses to grow. In our reading the winter festival is the more interesting of the two as a programming proposition - it is small enough to take risks, its residency and prize structure genuinely launches careers, and it puts new music in front of an audience that came for the skiing. It also solves a real problem for the visitor: Gstaad's evenings in high season are otherwise a matter of hotel dining rooms, and this is the one thing in the valley you can buy a ticket to.

02The week around it

The last days of January and first of February are the top of the Saanenland's winter. The Gstaad Mountain Rides ski area is at full strength across Eggli, Wispile, Saanerslochgrat, Rinderberg and the Glacier 3000, the promenade is busy from mid-afternoon, and the valley's hotels are at their annual peak occupancy just before the Swiss half-term holidays add another wave. The festival sits inside that without competing with it: concerts are in the late afternoon and evening, the venues are ten minutes apart by car or train, and audiences come off the mountain and change. What is public in the valley that week is the whole of it - the promenade, the Saanen and Gstaad markets, the sledging runs, the winter walking paths along the Saane and the free village buses. Concerts in the churches are ticketed and small; almost everything else about the week is not.

03When to arrive

Come for a Thursday-to-Sunday or a Friday-to-Sunday and take two or three concerts. The opening weekend and the closing Saturday carry the largest events. Because the venues are small, decide on concerts before booking anything else - the rooms are easier to find than the seats.

04Where to stay

Gstaad village along the promenade is the natural base and puts you within a short drive or train ride of every venue; the Gstaad Palace and the Alpina are the landmarks above it. Saanen, five minutes down the valley, is beside the church that hosts the closing concert and is quieter and cheaper. Schonried, Saanenmoser and Gsteig are the mountain villages, all on the MOB railway. Rougemont, over the border into the Vaud, is ten minutes away and has its own church. Staying anywhere on the railway line works, which matters because the festival deliberately moves between villages.

05Access and hospitality

Tickets are sold by the festival, concert by concert. Venue capacities are small - these are village churches and a chapel, not concert halls - so the constraint is seats rather than price, and the best-known soloists sell out first. The festival's supporters' association, Les Amis des Sommets Musicaux, funds the prizes and the residency. No commercial hospitality tier is published.

06Where the social activity happens

The interval and post-concert crowd outside the churches, which in February means standing in the snow for five minutes and then moving on; the Gstaad promenade and its terraces; the bar and Grand Hall of the Gstaad Palace and the hotel bars along the valley. During the day, the mountain restaurants on Eggli and Wispile and the sun terraces at Saanerslochgrat. The festival audience and the ski audience are largely the same people at different hours.

07Getting there

08Practicalities

09History

The festival was created at the start of the 2000s to give Gstaad a winter musical programme distinct from the summer Menuhin Festival, using the valley's churches rather than building a venue. It has kept that form. Renaud Capucon took the artistic direction in 2016, since when the residency and prize structure has become the festival's identifying feature: the Prix Thierry Scherz supports a first recording with orchestra, and the Prix Andre Hoffmann recognizes the interpretation of contemporary work. The 2026 edition was the twenty-sixth.

10Who is there

Gstaad's winter residents and chalet owners, Swiss and French classical audiences from Geneva, Lausanne and Bern, hotel guests already in the valley for the skiing, the artists' own following, and a small international contingent that comes specifically for the residency and prize concerts. Older and quieter than the summer festival's audience and much smaller.