The Grafenegg Festival will start on Friday, 11 August 2023, with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's incidental music to Shakespeare's «A Midsummer Night's Dream».

Nikola Hillebrand and Patricia Nolz will be on stage as soloists, Cornelius Obonya will take on the role of narrator and the ladies of the Wiener Singverein will sing. The Tonkunstler Orchestra plays under the direction of its chief conductor Yutaka Sado. Also on the programme is Richard Strauss' tone poem «Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche».
The first matinee of the Festival on 13 August 2023 will also be dedicated to romantic music, with the Festival Strings Lucerne and Kian Soltani as soloist in Schumann's Cello Concerto. Arthur Honegger's «Pastorale d'été», which will be heard at the beginning, is another homage to summer on the opening weekend.
Immediately after the Festival Opening, the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra makes its debut with Rudolf Buchbinder at the Wolkenturm. The programme includes Beeethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto and the Second Symphony by the Ukrainian national composer Levko Revutsky. The orchestra is now temporarily based in Germany because of the Russian war.
Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninov join the programmes of the international guest orchestras. Manfred Honeck and the European Union Youth Orchestra will begin with Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony and Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 with Martin James Bartlett.