Music
Red Bull Symphonic Makes History in Johannesburg
Get the scoop on a genre-defining first, in which Sun-El Musician and Dlala Thukzin became the first two headliners ever to share a single Red Bull Symphonic stage.
Part of this story
Over two sold-out nights at Montecasino this weekend, Red Bull Symphonic delivered its boldest South African chapter yet. For the first time in the series’ global history, two headliners shared a single stage: house pioneer Sun-El Musician and Durban powerhouse Dlala Thukzin, their catalogues reimagined by Maestro Chad Hendricks and a full symphonic orchestra under the banner Afro House, Our Home.
Overview
© Tyrone Bradley / Red Bull Content Pool
Zee Nxumalo
© Tyrone Bradley / Red Bull Content Pool
Overview
© Tyrone Bradley / Red Bull Content Pool
Msaki and Sun El Musician
© Mpumelelo Macu / Red Bull Content Pool
And for the first time anywhere, the spectacle refused to stay in the room. Night two streamed live on SABC 1, South Africa’s most-watched television channel, carrying the swell of the orchestra and the pulse of the dancefloor to millions of viewers nationwide. It marked the first Red Bull Symphonic to be broadcast live on a national external broadcaster, turning a sold-out ticket into a shared national moment.
The road here reads like a slow, deliberate build. In 2024, Red Bull Symphonic arrived in South Africa with a simple, audacious promise: Amapiano meets the Grand Piano. Kabza De Small headlined, and a genre born in the townships found itself draped in strings. In 2025, Kelvin Momo took the baton, deepening the dialogue between the country’s contemporary sound and the classical canon. Each edition sold out. Each raised the bar. In 2026, the platform did not simply raise it again. It rewrote the rules.
Afro House, Our Home set out to honour house music as the root system of South African sound, the genre that seeded kwaito, gqom, amapiano and the emerging 3-step wave. By pairing Sun-El Musician’s transcendent, melody-rich house with Dlala Thukzin’s raw gqom voltage, the production framed two artists who carry the past, command the present and are actively shaping what comes next.
Under Hendricks, resident conductor of the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra and music director of the Cape Town Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, familiar anthems were rebuilt from the ground up. The Vocal Hue choir and a competition-selected community choir, drawn from an open national call, lent their voices across both nights, anchoring the orchestral grandeur in something unmistakably local. Under the open Johannesburg sky at the Montecasino outdoor arena, strings and synths met as equals, and a packed crowd answered every crescendo.
That demand told its own story. Both nights sold out well ahead of the weekend, leaving organisers fielding requests they simply could not meet, a reminder of how far the platform has travelled in three short years.
From Amapiano and the Grand Piano in 2024 to a sold-out, nationally broadcast double-header in 2026, Red Bull Symphonic has grown into one of the most ambitious live music platforms in the country. It is a stage where the music that moves South Africa is finally handed the scale it has always deserved. If this weekend proved anything, it is that the story is still building, and the next chapter is already being written.
Part of this story
