Sunday Mornings, Gilded: The Astoria Concerts Return

The finest hotels don’t just accommodate — they orchestrate. In Brussels, the Corinthia Grand Hotel Astoria is doing exactly that. Freshly restored to its Belle Époque glory, the landmark has revived one of the city’s most elegant traditions: the Concerts Astoria. Held in the Salon Elisabeth, a heritage hall with acoustics as golden as its chandeliers, these Sunday morning concerts once again turn Brussels into a destination for the art of listening.

For nearly four decades, these gatherings were the city’s insider ritual — the kind of cultural rendezvous where music, heritage, and style effortlessly mingled. After years of silence, the series has returned, not as nostalgia but as a new expression of what luxury can mean today: time, presence, and immersion.

The season reads like a passport of brilliance. Pianist Valère Burnon, fresh from his triumph at the Reine Elisabeth Competition, opened the cycle with Beethoven and Franck.

Later, the cosmopolitan duo of Reinoud Van Mechelen and Anna Besson reimagine baroque and folk with rare intimacy. There are evenings of poetry in motion, like pianists Eliane Reyes and Laura Mikkola at four hands, and concerts that evoke Parisian cabaret with a modern edge — Kiki à Paris, a journey into the effervescent spirit of Montparnasse. Each Sunday offers a new lens on heritage, refracted through curiosity and daring.

But the real seduction lies in the ritual itself. In a culture ruled by speed and screens, these concerts invite a different pace: sit, listen, let the music seduce you into stillness. Swap the scroll for a sonata, the feed for a fugue. This is not classical music as dusty relic, but as curated experience — a playlist for the liberated mind, performed live, with champagne in hand.

The appeal goes far beyond classical music. It’s about stepping into a space where heritage and contemporary creativity collide, where a Sunday morning becomes a passport to something richer. This is culture reframed as lifestyle — elegant, alive, and unapologetically present.

So if you find yourself in Brussels on a Sunday, skip the ordinary. Slip into the Astoria, claim your seat beneath its gilded ceilings, and let the music remind you: in a world obsessed with noise, the most radical luxury is simply to listen.

Concerts Astoria
Corinthia Grand Hotel Astoria Brussels — Salon Elisabeth
Rue Royale 103, 1000 Brussels

Sundays, 11:30 a.m.
Reservations: sevenrooms.com/events/palmcourtbrussels
Info: www.corinthia.com/brussels/concerts