Classical Music, Concerts & Opera in Greater Boston
Sun Nov 8 · 3:00pm
An all-Beethoven recital marking the bicentennial of the composer's death: the First Sonata, Op. 2 No. 1, dedicated to Haydn; the "Tempest," Op. 31 No. 2; the compact Op. 79; and the "Waldstein," Op. 53, to close. Igor Levit makes his Symphony Hall recital debut.
Tue Oct 6 · 7:00pm
Billed as “Nature Unbound: Music Inspired by the Great Outdoors,” the concert centres on Poulenc’s The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant, his setting of Jean de Brunhoff’s picture book for narrator and piano, with Jim Crowley of the English department narrating and Deborah Nemko of the music department at the piano. Also on the programme are Sibelius’s The Pines, Rachmaninoff’s Lilacs and Gershwin’s Promenade (Walking the Dog).
Wed Oct 7 · 7:30pm
David Loebel conducts the Philharmonia in two symphonies in minor keys: Mozart's Symphony No. 25 in G minor, K. 183, the so-called little G minor written when the composer was seventeen, and after the intermission Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93, completed in 1953, the year of Stalin's death, and his first symphony since the Ninth of 1945.
Wed Oct 7 · 12:10pm
Saxophonist Andy Wilds, Program Manager in Music at MIT Music and Theater Arts, and pianist Eileen Huang, an MIT chemistry graduate of 2005 and MIT Affiliated Artist, play lyrical works for saxophone and piano by Rachmaninoff, Creston, Bozza and others. The Chapel's monthly half-hour midday concerts are meant as a space for stillness and reflection; listeners may drop in at any point, and snacks follow.
Wed Oct 7 · 6:00pm
A Hispanic Heritage Month program of Latin American songs and classical works for voice and piano, by composers including Villa-Lobos, Ponce, Velázquez, Lecuona and Calvo. Sopranos Hannah Shannefield and Isis Bermudez Rivera, countertenor Lucas Coura and tenor David Rivera Bozon sing, with pianist Estefanía Nuñez Villamandos. The library bills it as family-friendly; registration is preferred but not required.
Wed Oct 7 · 8:00pm
Violinist Markus Placci, pianist Judith Gordon and cellist Rhonda Rider play Haydn's "Gypsy" Trio in G major, Hob. XV:25, and Brahms's Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 101, around two modern pieces, Lutosławski's Subito (1994) and Jonathan Harvey's Curve with Plateaux (1982). Gordon taught at Smith College from 2006 to 2020 and has soloed with the Boston Pops; Rider was the Lydian Quartet's cellist for over two decades.
Thu Oct 8 · 7:30pm
Schumann frames the recital at both ends: the Eighth Novelette, Op. 21, to open and the Symphonic Études, Op. 13, to close, with Fauré's F-sharp major Ballade, Rzewski's "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues" and Leon Kirchner's Interlude II in between. Gagliano, a pianist, makes her Vivo debut.
Thu Oct 8 · 7:30pm
John Mallia, who teaches at NEC, curates a programme of new and recent music: his own Concrete, Metal, Rust, Moss (2026) and Stray Signals (2007), the world premiere of Sid Richardson's Ringer, Robert Ceely's Metamir (2009) in a revised acoustic version, and Joseph Bozich's City in Stasis (2026). Bozich conducts; Mallia performs on electronics and Richardson on double bass and electronics, with fourteen other musicians.
Fri Oct 9 · 7:30pm
The Kendall Square Orchestra under Kristo Kondakçi opens its season with Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony (movements 1 and 4), Copland's Lincoln Portrait — narrated by Sean K. Ellis, who was wrongly convicted and jailed for 21 years before winning his freedom — and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7.
$15–$50
Fri Oct 9 · 8:00pm
This memorial to Edward Cohen, the MIT composer and senior lecturer, centers on his 1978 Stone and Earth for mezzo-soprano and string orchestra, sung by Krista River under his longtime collaborator David Hoose. Colleagues and students supply three premieres: Charles Shadle's Song of Removal, a new Marjorie Merryman work and the orchestral version of John Harbison's Four Encores for Stan, with River narrating. Peter Child's 1998 Sinfonietta closes.
$15 general admission; free for MIT ID holders
Thu Oct 8 – Sat Oct 10
Thu Oct 8 · 7:30pm / Fri Oct 9 · 1:30pm / Sat Oct 10 · 8pm
Beethoven's Coriolan Overture opens and his Seventh Symphony closes, framing the U.S. premiere of a piano concerto by the Spanish composer Francisco Coll, a former protégé of Thomas Adès, with Kirill Gerstein the soloist. Andris Nelsons conducts the BSO co-commission.
Sat Oct 10 · 12:00pm
Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, complete: the four Op. 8 violin concertos, from Spring's birdsong through Summer's storms to Winter's ice. Lynn Chang, the violinist, leads Hemenway Strings, the student chamber ensemble of Boston Conservatory at Berklee. Presented by the Roxbury Concert Series with Neighborhood Arts.
Sat Oct 10 · 7:30pm
Chanticleer traces the American choral tradition from shape-note singing and Black gospel quartets through barbershop to vocal jazz, marking the country's 250th year. At its centre is a new commission from Trevor Weston drawing the line between traditional American hymnody and African American spirituals.
Fri Oct 9 – Sat Oct 10 · 7pm/2pm
Fri Oct 9 · 7pm / Sat Oct 10 · 2pm
The touring Grand Kyiv Ballet dances Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake reimagined with an illuminated projection design — the corps in glowing costume against animated light. Two evenings at the Colonial; unrelated to Boston Ballet, whose season stays at the Citizens Opera House.
Sat Oct 10 · 7:30pm
Odyssey Opera programmes three composers of the Second New England School: Edward MacDowell's tone poem Lamia, drawn from Greek myth; Amy Beach's concert aria Jephthah's Daughter, drawn from the Book of Judges; and George W. Chadwick's opera The Padrone, a portrait of immigrant life in turn-of-the-century Boston. All three helped define the city's musical identity around 1900.
Sat Oct 10 · 7:00pm
The premiere of Martin Brody's The Carp, a forty-five-minute chamber operetta for four singers and five instrumentalists, built from a 2003 news story about a fish in a New York market that was reported to have spoken. Brody worked with art historian Dario Gamboni on the piece, which treats the episode as apocalyptic comedy.
Sat Oct 10 · 7:30pm
The Vista Philharmonic, Groton Hill's resident orchestra, opens its season for America's 250th with William Grant Still's Symphony No. 1, Afro-American, the first work by a Black composer performed by a major U.S. orchestra, and Copland's Symphony No. 3, whose finale draws on his Fanfare for the Common Man. Sara Davis Buechner, the 1984 Gina Bachauer gold medallist and a Temple University piano professor, plays Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.
Fri Oct 9 – Sat Oct 10 · 8:00pm/12:00pm
Fri Oct 9 · 8:00pm, Seully Hall (Boston (Fenway)) / Sat Oct 10 · 12:00pm, Roxbury Public Library
Lynn Chang directs the Conservatory's string ensemble in Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, its sonnets rewritten for a changing climate and each concerto taken by a different student soloist, alongside Dvořák's Waltzes Nos. 1 and 4, Op. 54, spirituals arranged by H.T. Burleigh, music from Philip Glass's Mishima quartet, and Randall Thompson's Alleluia in memory of former Conservatory president Richard Ortner. The second performance moves to Roxbury Public Library.
Sat Oct 10 · 8:00pm
Michael Lewin, who teaches piano at the Conservatory, plays Clementi's Sonata in F-sharp minor, Op. 25 No. 5, two Brahms intermezzos (Op. 119 No. 1 and Op. 118 No. 6) and Chopin's Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, the "Funeral March". After the interval come Janáček's sonata 1.X.1905, "From the Street", written after a demonstrator's death in Brno, and Liszt's Petrarch Sonnet No. 104 and Hungarian Rhapsody No. 8.
Sat Oct 10 · 8:00pm
The Hinge Quartet, Philipp Stäudlin on saxophones, Dan VanHassel on electric guitar, Matt Sharrock on percussion and Keith Kirchoff on piano, opens its season with Steven Ricks's four-movement Extended Play (2007), which takes its title from rock's EP, alongside Nico Muhly's Flexible Music, Jessie Cox's Black as a Hack for Cyborgification, Badie Khaleghian's anonymous and Katarina Rosenberger's modules. The quartet is the Conservatory's contemporary ensemble-in-residence.
Sat Oct 10 · 4:00pm
Prokofiev's 1936 tale Peter and the Wolf, written to introduce children to the instruments of the orchestra, is played by a woodwind quintet whose flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn are the voices Prokofiev gave the bird, the duck, the cat, the grandfather and the wolf. The professional puppeteering group Really Inventive Stuff brings the story to life in this free family concert in the Saturdays at 4 series.
Sat Oct 10 – Sun Oct 11 · 7:30pm/4pm
Sat Oct 10 · 7:30pm / Sun Oct 11 · 4pm
Five composers at their beginnings: Britten's Phantasy Quartet, Op. 2, Carter's Woodwind Quintet of 1948, Beethoven's Second Violin Sonata, Op. 12, Cage's Nocturne for violin and piano, and Strauss's C minor Piano Quartet, Op. 13. The ensemble frames them as early inspirations of composers who became defining voices.
Sun Oct 11 · 3:00pm
Vaughan Williams's early C minor Piano Quintet, withdrawn in his lifetime and unpublished for decades, joins Mozart's E-flat Piano Quartet, K. 493 and Mendelssohn's Second String Quintet, Op. 87, written two years before his death. Alfred Einstein called the Mozart finale's melody "the purest, most childlike and godlike" ever sung.
Sun Oct 11 · 3:00pm
Weber's Der Freischütz overture opens, followed by Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D and Brahms's Fourth Symphony. Benjamin Zander's pre-concert Guide to the Music runs an hour and a quarter beforehand in the hall. First of four subscription programmes in what the orchestra has announced as its final season.
Fri Oct 9 – Sun Oct 11
Fri Oct 9 · 7:30pm / Sat Oct 10 · 2pm & 7:30pm / Sun Oct 11 · 2pm
Weill and Brecht’s 1933 sung ballet splits one woman in two: Anna I, the practical side, who sings, and Anna II, the artistic side, who dances. Sent by their family to earn the money for a little house on the Mississippi, they meet a different sin in each of seven American cities. Nathan Troup directs a spare Fringe staging, with Georgi Videnov conducting and Matthew Larson as music director.
Sun Oct 11 · 3pm
Artistic directors Daniel Chong, violin, and Jessica Bodner, viola, both members of the Parker Quartet, open the season with cellist Karen Ouzounian and pianist Katherine Chi. Two piano quartets frame a string duo: Mozart's Piano Quartet in G minor, K. 478, Ravel's Sonata for Violin and Cello, and Brahms's Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor, Op. 60. The four performers give a pre-concert talk.
Sun Oct 11 · 3:00pm
The Ringers' brass ensemble pairs Holst's St. Paul's Suite and Chris Hazell's Cat Suite with music from Latin America: Villa-Lobos's Choros No. 1, Máximo Diego Pujol's Plaza Italia, Manuel M. Ponce's Marchita el Alma and Luiz Bonfá's Passeio no Río. Jan Koetsier's Brass Symphony closes the afternoon at University Lutheran Church in Harvard Square.
Sun Oct 11 · 7:30pm
Helix Ensemble and artistic director Tianyi Ren give what they believe is the Boston premiere of Bruckner's Symphony No. 1 in its Vienna version, the composer's 1890–91 revision of his 1866 score, which he nicknamed “das kecke Beserl” (“the saucy maid”). The orchestra gathers 42 young musicians from across the Boston area, and the concert presents the early Bruckner before the monumental symphonies of his later years.
Sun Oct 11 · 7:00pm
VOCES8, the British a cappella ensemble whose Decca recording of Christopher Tin's The Lost Birds was Grammy-nominated in 2023, sings Lead Me Home, a programme of American choral music. The first half sets William Byrd beside Billings, Virgil Thomson, two spirituals, Caroline Shaw, Lauridsen and Whitacre; the second turns to Barber's To Be Sung on the Water, "Shenandoah", Don McLean's "Vincent" and Cole Porter.
Wed Oct 14 · 7:30pm
The Chamber Orchestra gives its first concert of the season, prepared by its artistic director Donald Palma and playing without a conductor. Its players are chosen by audition, and the ensemble exists to carry chamber-music habits into an orchestral setting.
Thu Oct 15 · 7:00pm
Marking the nation's 250th anniversary, pianist Wayman Chin, Longy faculty member and dean emeritus, plays a program built around the American psyche: works by Copland, Barber and Bernstein; Beethoven's Seven Variations on “God Save the King,” the tune Americans sing as “My Country, ’tis of Thee”; and pieces by contemporary composers Jeremy Van Buskirk and Nico Muhly, whose Refine is a short variation on “America the Beautiful.”
Thu Oct 15 · 7:00pm
Boston Festival Orchestra's chamber series sets two Soviet contemporaries side by side: Zara Levina, largely unknown to American audiences, whose Kanzonetta and Fantasy on Bashkir Themes draw on folk traditions and Jewish themes, and Dmitri Shostakovich, whose wartime Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor ends in a grotesque dance on Jewish themes. Violinist Alyssa Wang, cellist Samuel Boundy and pianist Jihye Chang perform.
$30 general admission
Thu Oct 15 · 7:30pm
Salem State's music faculty give their fall recital, with a programme running from classical to jazz. The faculty performers are the soprano Jean Danton, Steve Lacey, Cyndi Napierkowski, Ashley Offret, Beverly Soll, Eileen Yarrison and Holly Zagaria, joined by the students Max Beauregard and Jacqueline Hernandez. Admission is free, with a goodwill offering welcome at the door.
Fri Oct 16 · 8:00pm
Two composers' last quartets, Shostakovich's Fifteenth, Op. 144, six adagios played without a break, and Beethoven's Op. 131 in C-sharp minor, each set off by a fugue arrangement drawn from Shostakovich's Op. 87 and Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. The Brentano Quartet plays.
Fri Oct 16 · 7:30pm
Stile Antico sings a tour of Renaissance Europe's musical cities — papal Rome, scholarly Paris, and the port cities of Lisbon and Seville grown rich on treasure from newly charted parts of the globe — with music by Monteverdi, Palestrina and Tallis. The twelve-voice ensemble has performed without a conductor since forming in 2005.
Fri Oct 16 · 5:30pm
BLO's 50th-anniversary gala at its Fort Point studios culminates in a performance by Michael Fabiano, one of the leading American tenors of his generation. It is a fundraising evening with gala pricing — but also the only chance to hear Fabiano in Boston this season.
Fri Oct 16 · 8:00pm
The MIT Symphony Orchestra opens its season under Adam Boyles with a programme of hooligans, pranksters and troublemakers: Saint-Saëns's Phaéton, Chadwick's Hobgoblin, Prokofiev's suite from Lieutenant Kijé, the overture to Mozart's Don Giovanni and three excerpts from Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel. Free with an MIT ID; the concert is also livestreamed.
$15; free with an MIT ID
Fri Oct 16 · 5:00pm
The Boston Conservatory at Berklee choirs open their choral season with an early-evening concert of short performances by the Conservatory choir, chorale and chamber choir, a first look at the repertoire, collaborations and special events planned for the year ahead. Dr. Spinelli and Dr. Gardiner lead the evening alongside the Conservatory's master of music candidates in choral conducting. It opens the Conservatory's Friends and Family Weekend.
Thu Oct 15 – Sat Oct 17
Thu Oct 15 · 7:30pm / Fri Oct 16 · 1:30pm / Sat Oct 17 · 8pm
Violinist Hilary Hahn and cellist Seth Parker Woods are the soloists in a new double concerto written for them by the BSO's composer chair, Carlos Simon. Around it, Andris Nelsons conducts Tchaikovsky, character dances from the Nutcracker and orchestral music from the opera Eugene Onegin.
Sat Oct 17 · 3:00pm
An afternoon of African American spirituals: the foundational settings of H.T. Burleigh, James Weldon Johnson and R. Nathaniel Dett, woven through newer works by Adolphus Hailstork, Jessie Montgomery and others. Castle of our Skins, the Boston ensemble devoted to Black artistry, scores the programme for voice, strings and piano.
Sat Oct 17 · 8:00pm
Jonathan Russell's Quintet for Clarinet and Strings gets its world premiere, a Radius co-commission, alongside Mary Kouyoumdjian's Studies on Rage for Each Day of the Week and Caroline Shaw's Limestone and Felt for viola and cello. Poulenc's 1932 Sextet for piano and winds closes.
Sat Oct 17
Verdi's Macbeth, transmitted live in HD from the Met: soprano Lise Davidsen and baritone Quinn Kelsey as Shakespeare's scheming, murderous couple in Louisa Proske's powerful new production, with tenor Freddie De Tommaso as Macduff. Met music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts, screened from the Met stage into cinemas.
Sat Oct 17 · 2:00pm
L'Armonia Boston opens its season at Gore Place with music of 1806 — the year the Gore family moved into their new Waltham house and Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga, the 'Spanish Mozart', was born — paired with Beethoven, on period instruments.
$60 ($15 student)
Sat Oct 17 · 7:30pm
Joshua Brown returns to the Boston Chamber Symphony as soloist in the Brahms Violin Concerto, on a season-opening programme with Mozart's overture to Così fan tutte and Beethoven's Eighth Symphony. Brown won second prize and both audience awards at the 2024 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels and received a 2025 Avery Fisher Career Grant; La Libre praised his 'richness of sound, elegance of reading'.
Sat Oct 17 · 1:00pm
Verdi's Shakespeare, in a new Met staging by Louisa Proske, screened on Cape Ann as it is transmitted. Quinn Kelsey is the Scottish king and Lise Davidsen the Lady whose ambition damns them both, with Freddie De Tommaso as Macduff and Ryan Speedo Green as Banquo. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts. Rockport Music's Live in HD series runs through June.
$30, $27
Sat Oct 17 · 2pm
Violist Taisiya Sokolova and violinist Leqing Wang play a duo recital for all ages. Sokolova, born in Russia, recently completed a doctorate in viola performance at Boston University under Steve Ansell of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Wang, born in China, has played Walton’s Violin Concerto as soloist with the Boston University Symphony Orchestra and won the Grand Prize in the BU Bach Competition.
Sat Oct 17 · 3:00pm
Pianist Liana Paniyeva plays Brahms's Seven Fantasies, Op. 116, Schumann's Sonata No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22, and Amy Beach's Four Sketches, Op. 15. A graduate of the Donetsk Music Academy, the Manhattan School of Music and the Hartt School, she won the Grand Prize at the 2012 Metropolitan International Piano Competition and the American Prize in 2021, and founded the Young Stars International Piano Competition.
Sat Oct 17 · 8:00pm
Jotaro Nakano conducts the Longwood Symphony Orchestra, whose players are drawn largely from Boston's medical community, in Rossini's overture to The Barber of Seville, Gustavo Larrea's Fayuca and Gershwin's Concerto in F, with the pianist Albert Cano Smit as soloist. Like each Longwood concert, the evening raises money for a partner organisation, this time Tunefoolery Music. The orchestra lists the programme as subject to change.
Zone A Adult $49/Senior $42/Student $10; Zone B Adult $32/Senior $27/Student $10; Zone C Adult $15/Senior $12/Student $10
Sat Oct 17 · 2pm
Daniel Parsley conducts the Boston University Chamber Choir, University Choruses and Graduate Conductors Chorus in a programme on water, heritage and open landscapes by contemporary composers. It includes Carol Barnett’s A World Beloved: Bluegrass Mass, Ola Gjeilo’s Tundra, Andrea Ramsey’s Lineage, Susan LaBarr’s The River, Connor Koppin’s Everything, Everything, Shawn Kirchner’s Unclouded Day and Craig Hella Johnson’s Let the River Run.
Sun Oct 18
Three Esther cantatas from Rembrandt's century — by Carissimi, Charpentier and Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, among the few professional women composers of the French Baroque — with instrumental music by the Jewish Mantuan composer Salamone Rossi. The period-instrument band ACRONYM plays, in step with the museum's fall exhibition.
Sun Oct 18 · 3:00pm
The 2021 Chopin Competition winner builds a recital of contrasts around Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata and two Chopin Nocturnes, Op. 27, with Bach's Fifth French Suite, Ligeti's "Fanfares," Albéniz's "El Puerto," Ravel's Alborada del gracioso and Liszt's Rhapsodie espagnole set around them. Bruce Liu plays.
Sun Oct 18 · 4:00pm
A chamber programme on the natural world: Su Lian Tan's River of the Trunk, setting a text by John Elder for soprano, violin, cello and piano; Iman Habibi's string quartet Beloved of the Sky; and Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, in M.G. Fischer's arrangement for string sextet. Kristen Watson is the soprano, with Leslie Amper at the keyboard and Emmanuel Music string players. Tickets are choose-what-you-pay.
Sun Oct 18 · 4:00pm
The soprano Shelén Hughes Camacho and the baritone Joseph Parrish, who won the 2022 Young Concert Artists international auditions, sing a programme called Love Letter to the Americas — songs, arias and show tunes running from Mozart to the present. Amir Farid accompanies.
Oct 16/18 · 7:30pm/2:30pm
Fri Oct 16 · 7:30pm / Sun Oct 18 · 2:30pm
Broadway singers Christine Dwyer and Matt DeAngelis front the orchestra under guest conductor Andrew Cote in a programme of show songs. The Friday performance is the orchestra's gala, with receptions beforehand; the same programme repeats on Sunday afternoon without them.
Sun Oct 18 · 3:00pm
Flautist Paula Robison plays Vivaldi with a chamber orchestra of NEC students, in a concert the Conservatory bills as celebrating 85 years and a life of music-making. Robison, who teaches at NEC, won first prize at the Geneva International Music Competition in 1966 and was a founding artist member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. She studied with Marcel Moyse and, at Juilliard, with Julius Baker.
Sun Oct 18 · 8:00pm
Baritone Michael Meraw, with pianist Leonardo Ciampa, sings Italian art songs by Paolo Tosti, among them Sogno and L'ultima canzone, and three by Stefano Donaudy, including Vaghissima sembianza, then gives the Boston premiere of Ciampa's Trilogia della Luce. Meraw has sung with Seattle Opera, Opéra Atelier and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in roles including Szymanowski's King Roger and Rossini's Figaro.
Thu Oct 15 – Sun Oct 18
Thu Oct 15 · 7:30pm / Fri Oct 16 · 7:30pm / Sat Oct 17 · 1pm & 7:30pm / Sun Oct 18 · 1pm
Six world premieres made on the Conservatory's contemporary dance majors, by guest choreographers Igal Perry, Sean Curran, Germaul Barnes and Moscelyne ParkeHarrison and by faculty members Junichi Fukuda and Emily Jerant-Hendrickson. Sophomores, juniors and seniors dance. The Conservatory has selected it for its Center Stage collection, the small group of productions it promotes each season.
Sun Oct 18 · 3pm
Six New England organists play a benefit recital for the cathedral’s 1875 E & GG Hook & Hastings organ, Opus 801, a 101-rank instrument of 5,292 pipes. They include Leo Abbott, the cathedral’s director of music emeritus; the current director, Richard J. Clark; Jerrick Cavagnaro of Trinity Church, Copley Square; and Erica Johnson of the Wellesley College faculty. The event page names no individual works.
Suggested donation $20; seniors/students $10; any amount accepted; ages 17 and under free
Sat Oct 17 – Sun Oct 18 · 8pm/3pm
Sat Oct 17 · 8pm, St. John the Evangelist (Wellesley Hills) / Sun Oct 18 · 3pm, First Church in Cambridge
Seraphim Singers open their 29th season with Rachel Fuller’s Animal Requiem for chorus and chamber ensemble, alongside companion pieces by Tom Vignieri, Caroline Shaw and Paul McCartney. Music director Eric Christopher Perry conducts, with organist Heinrich Christensen. The concert space will include ways to remember animals the audience has cared for, along with information on animal rescue and welfare organizations.
General $30; seniors $25; students $15; first-time attendees $15
Sun Oct 18 · 2:00pm
Guitarist David William Ross gives a free recital in the Boston Classical Guitar Society’s community series. Trained in both classical and jazz, Ross works closely with contemporary composers and has premiered guitar music by Frank Wallace, Georges Raillard, Ferdinando DeSena and Peter Dayton, among others. He is also a recording engineer across genres from jazz to barbershop, and holds degrees in music theory, composition and guitar.
Sun Oct 18 · 3:00pm
Pianists Susan Grace and Edith Auner share one keyboard for an afternoon of music for piano four hands, with works by Brahms, Poulenc, Grieg and Kapustin, a Ukrainian-born composer who wrote fully notated classical forms in a jazz idiom. The concert belongs to the Tufts music department's Sunday Concert Series, which is free and needs no ticket.
Sun Oct 18 · 7:00pm
Faculty artists Dana Maiben, violin, and Vivian Montgomery, harpsichord, play Italian music of the 1600s, when performer and composer were the same person: instrumental covers of the day's popular songs, some of the earliest violin sonatas, ground-bass pieces and improvisation. Composers include Barbara Strozzi, Biagio Marini, Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, Isabella Leonarda and Salamone Rossi, and the program closes with the premiere of an improvisation-based work by John Morrison.
Sun Oct 18 · 3:00pm
Cellist Allison Eldredge, Cherry Street Music's artistic director, welcomes back pianist Jonathan Bass and three Boston Symphony Orchestra players: Alexander Velinzon, the BSO's first associate concertmaster, violinist Tatiana Dimitriades and assistant principal violist Cathy Basrak. Dimitriades and Bass, who are married, play a Beethoven sonata; Velinzon and Basrak play the Handel-Halvorsen Sarabande; and all five join for Schumann's Piano Quintet, written for his wife, the pianist Clara Wieck Schumann.
$45–$60
Sun Oct 18 · 3:00pm
Concert pianist Liana Paniyeva gives October's Bob Dodd Sunday Concert, part of a monthly library series whose fall season also brings the Spectacle Collective, clarinetist Chester Brezniak and the pianist, singer and storyteller Jay Daniels. The hour-long recital is streamed live on the library's YouTube channel, and refreshments are served from 2:30, when the doors open. The Friends of the Framingham Library sponsor the series in part.
Sat Oct 17 – Sun Oct 18
Detritus dance performs Conversations: Above and Beneath, a roaming, site-responsive dance installation modelled on Margaret Fuller Ossoli's “Conversations,” the 1839–1844 gatherings of Boston women denied formal education. It traces writer Fuller, poet Maria White Lowell, actor Charlotte Cushman, sculptor Edmonia Lewis and historian Hannah Adams, with stops at gravesites, the Hygeia Statue and Hazel Dell. The queer, women-led company was founded in 2021 by Caroline Bradbury and Claire Lane.
Mon Oct 19 · 7:30pm
Joshua Roach and the School of Music's graduate conductors lead the Boston University Symphony Orchestra in a programme on humanity and the natural world: Verdi's Overture to Nabucco, the world premiere of Terra Branta Canadensis by Jacob M. Whitchurch, a BU composition winner, and Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, "Pastoral," whose five movements evoke countryside scenes, a storm and renewal.
Tue Oct 20 · 7:30pm
Longy faculty and student musicians play a programme without announcing what it is: no titles and no composers until each piece has finished. The premise, as Longy puts it, is that first contact shapes how a work is received; in a gallery you see the art before reading the label, and here you hear the music before learning what it was.
Tue Oct 20 · 6:30pm
Boston Camerata marks the death of Joel Cohen, who directed the ensemble from 1963 to 2008 and remained its music director emeritus until he died on 26 July 2026. Under him the Camerata became one of the leading American early-music groups. The programme had not been announced when this was recorded.
Wed Oct 21 · 7:30pm
David Loebel leads the NEC Symphony in Jessie Montgomery's Overture and Haydn's Symphony No. 88 in G major, then a Dvořák second half: two of the Slavonic Dances from the Op. 72 set, Nos. 2 and 6, and the Symphony No. 8 in G major, which Dvořák wrote in 1889 at his country house in Vysoká.
Wed Oct 21 · 1:30pm
The Khmer Urban Ballet's original work follows a Cambodian-American family of refugees and their descendants through intergenerational trauma and a separation forced by deportation. Across seven scenes that set traditional music beside contemporary, the dancers draw on their own experiences and memories of forced displacement, migration and healing. The performance runs 45 minutes and is followed by a question-and-answer session with the artists.
Wed Oct 21 · 7:30pm
Sarah Ioannides and graduate conductor David Scott lead the Boston University Chamber Orchestra in a programme pairing Haydn's Symphony No. 45, the Farewell, with twentieth-century scores: Deep Forest by the Massachusetts-born Mabel Daniels and Milhaud's jazz-inflected La Création du Monde, drawn from African creation myths. Andrius Žlabys, the Grammy-nominated pianist who lectures in piano at BU, closes with Franck's Symphonic Variations.
Wed Oct 21 · 12:15pm
Alessandro Bianchi, an Italian organist born in Como, plays a 45-minute midday recital. Bianchi studied at the Piacenza Conservatory, where he took diplomas in organ and organ composition with Luigi Toja, and attended masterclasses with Nicholas Danby and Arturo Sacchetti. He has been organist of the Basilica of St. Paul in Cantù and is artistic director of the musical association Amici dell'Organo di Cantù.
Thu Oct 22 · 6:30pm
Caroline Shaw, the composer, violinist and singer who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, and Andrew Yee, cellist, composer and founding member of the Attacca Quartet, play a selection of their music inspired by the places “we imagine and inhabit.” The pair co-composed a live score for Wu Tsang’s silent film Moby Dick. Harvard landscape historian Edward Eigen then talks with them.
Thu Oct 22 · 8:00pm
YaoGuang Zhai, who teaches clarinet at the Conservatory, gives a joint recital with the South African pianist Nina Schumann. A native of Taiyuan, China, and a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, Zhai was appointed principal clarinet of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2016 after posts with the Toronto and Shanghai symphonies. Schumann has headed piano at Stellenbosch University and performs as TwoPianists with her husband, Luis Magalhães.
Thu Oct 22 · 2:30pm
Dancers of Lowell's Khmer Urban Ballet perform seven poetic scenes tracing a Cambodian-American family through separation, migration and deportation after years of genocide and war. The piece opens with kbach, the fundamental gestures of classical Cambodian dance, which the dancers slowly turn into a symbolic tree. Peter Veth wrote the story and Chummeng Soun staged it, to music by Him Sophy and Cambodian Living Arts.
Fri Oct 23 · 7:30pm
Walter Hussey commissioned both Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb and Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, and both frame this programme. Between them comes the world premiere of Zachary Wadsworth's De Profundis, setting texts Oscar Wilde wrote in prison, conceived as a modern counterpart to the Britten.
Fri Oct 23 · 8:00 PM
The Conservatory orchestra comes to Symphony Hall with a triple concerto by the American composer James Stephenson written for three of the school's brass faculty, and a suite drawn from Holst's The Planets, whose movements take their characters from astrology rather than astronomy. Playing the Stephenson puts the teaching staff in front of their own students.
Fri Oct 23
A French programme built around Debussy's String Quartet in G minor, his only work in the form, with music by Ravel and others alongside it; the addition of harp points to the repertory the two composers wrote for that instrument. The St Ignatius series presents it in the church at Chestnut Hill.
Thu Oct 22 – Fri Oct 23
Skylark sings Tomás Luis de Victoria's Officium defunctorum, the six-voice Requiem he published in 1605 after writing it for the funeral of the Dowager Empress Maria of Austria, whom Victoria served as chaplain at the Descalzas Reales convent in Madrid. The Grammy-nominated ensemble, directed by Matthew Guard, gives it at Chestnut Hill and Newburyport before taking it to the Hispanic Society in New York.
Fri Oct 23 · 7:30pm
Soprano Brooke Schooley, contralto Vira Slywotzky and bass Patrick Scully sing solos, duets and trios drawn from opera, art song, musical theater and popular song, with David Sytkowski at the piano. Composers include Purcell, Mozart, Verdi, Duparc, Menotti, Rodgers and Sondheim, along with the Ukrainian composers Volodymyr Ivasiuk and Kostiantyn Dankevych. Slywotzky has sung principal roles with Seattle Opera, Chautauqua Opera and Boston Midsummer Opera.
Sat Oct 24 · 3:00pm
Franco-Flemish love songs set beside the motets and masses that Renaissance composers built from their tunes — music by Binchois, Du Fay, Okeghem, Agricola, La Rue and Bauldeweyn, the secular original and its sacred remaking heard together. Blue Heron sings, directed by Scott Metcalfe.
$10–$96; under 18 free
Thu Oct 22 – Sat Oct 24
Thu Oct 22 · 7:30pm / Fri Oct 23 · 1:30pm / Sat Oct 24 · 8pm
Kent Nagano conducts the premiere of a Tod Machover work that threads a live AI system through the orchestra, drawing out each player's individuality and recombining it across the ensemble; Machover directs the MIT Media Lab. The programme also takes in music of Mendelssohn and Nante.
Sat Oct 24 · 8:00pm
Méhul's First Symphony opens a French programme completed by Ravel's Ma Mère l'Oye, the fairy-tale suite he first wrote as a piano duet for two children, and Debussy's La mer. Méhul was a leading opera composer of the Revolutionary years whose symphonies went largely unplayed for a century afterwards.
Fri Oct 23 – Sat Oct 24
Fri Oct 23 · 8pm / Sat Oct 24 · 2pm & 8pm
The Australian contemporary-circus company opens Vivo's dance season with Ten Thousand Hours — the number a skill supposedly takes to master, turned into an hour of astonishing acrobatics about practice, persistence and failure. Human bodies doing impossible things, staged with the discipline of dance.
Sat Oct 24 · 7:00pm
The New England Philharmonic opens its fiftieth season against the Revolution's 250th anniversary, pairing the Middlesex County Volunteers Fifes and Drums with Joan Tower's Violin Concerto, played by Danielle Maddon, a new commission from composer-in-residence Carlos Carrillo, and Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. The programme sets period military music beside two contemporary responses to American history.
Sat Oct 24 · 2:00pm
The Boston Conservatory Faculty Woodwind Quintet (Sarah Brady, flute; Rob Sheena, oboe; Jan Holloran, clarinet; Sarah Sutherland, horn; Margaret Phillips, bassoon) plays chamber music by Irving Fine (1914–1962), who taught at Harvard and Tanglewood and founded the Brandeis School of Creative Arts. Aaron Copland praised his music’s “elegance, style, finish, and a convincing continuity.” An annual tribute, free, with a reception afterwards.
Sat Oct 24 · 7pm
Juventas New Music Ensemble presents a social-justice concert and community sing curated by its soprano Kelley Hollis, who performs with pianist Julia Scott Carey. Contemporary works include Anthony R. Green's ...all that is good, Ashi Day's Open Your Mouth, Rosephanye Powell's Songs for the People and Oliver Caplan's The New Colossus; the audience joins in on We Shall Overcome and This Land is Your Land.
Sat Oct 24 · 7:30pm
Musica Sacra opens Mary Beekman's final season as artistic director with Mozart's Requiem in the original Süssmayr edition, performed with full orchestra and soloists. Alongside it the chorus sings two settings of the Baroque composer Heinrich Schütz's Selig sind die Toten (“Blessed are the dead”). The concert is in person only, with no live stream, and is followed by a reception in Margaret Jewett Hall.
$20–$50
Sun Oct 25 · 1:30pm
A programme built entirely on the chrysanthemum, tied to the museum's annual courtyard installation: songs and short pieces by Massenet, Delibes, Puccini (Crisantemi), Scott Joplin, Dora Pejačević and Takemitsu, among others. Mezzo-soprano Kara Dugan and pianist Peter Dugan lead an all-star cast, hosted by the Gardner's music and horticulture curators.
Sun Oct 25 · 3:00pm
Mozart's nocturnal G-major Violin Sonata, K. 379, opens a wide-ranging programme that takes in Silvestrov's Two Pieces, Weinberg's Fifth Sonata of 1953, Webern's compressed Four Pieces and, to close, Strauss's early E-flat Sonata, Op. 18. The violinist Geneva Lewis makes her Vivo debut.
Sun Oct 25 · 3:00pm
An all-Beethoven programme from the Borromeo Quartet, who then bring young players from the Boston String Academy up beside them for side-by-side selections, the exchange the Stringfest series is built on, with students sharing a stand with the professionals rather than watching from the hall.
Sat Oct 24 – Sun Oct 25 · 3pm
Sat Oct 24 · 3pm, St. John's JP (Jamaica Plain) / Sun Oct 25 · 3pm, First Church Cambridge
Folie à deux, French for the madness of two, gathers six duos that run through every pairing of violin, viola, cello and marimba: Caroline Shaw's Limestone and Felt, Penderecki's Ciaccona, Golijov's Mariel and new works by Akshaya Avril Tucker, Fabian Otten and Paul Wiancko. Members of A Far Cry play.
Sun Oct 25 · 4:30pm
Songs of the young American republic — marches, anthems, spirituals and ballads by New England citizen-composers, alongside what the Camerata calls liberty's attendants: feminists, abolitionists, freed slaves and religious minorities. The programme was first commissioned by the Paris Philharmonie in 2018 and has since been recorded for Harmonia Mundi.
Sat Oct 24 – Sun Oct 25 · 4pm
Sat Oct 24 · 4pm, First Parish of Sudbury / Sun Oct 25 · 4pm, Old South Church (Boston)
A programme traced through teacher-to-student lineages: a trio sonata by Zachow, Handel's teacher, and an aria by J.C. Smith, Handel's student; string pieces by Kirnberger and Goldberg, both students of J.S. Bach; a flute sonata by Anna Amalia, Kirnberger's pupil; and arias by Porpora, Haydn's teacher, and Marianna Martines, Haydn's student. Guest soprano Corrine Byrne joins the period-instrument ensemble. The Boston performance is livestreamed.
Fri Oct 23 – Sun Oct 25
Fourth Dimension Tap Company presents a concert-tap programme over three performances in the Roberts Studio Theatre. The company is an independent Boston ensemble renting the BCA's studio house; the box office listing carries dates and ticketing but no programme detail.
Sun Oct 25 · 5:00pm
Music director Heinrich Christensen conducts the King's Chapel Choir through psalm settings spanning several centuries — Byrd and Billings at one end, Britten, Brahms and Abbie Betinis at the other. A Sunday-evening concert in the 1754 stone chapel on Tremont Street.
Fri Oct 23 – Sun Oct 25
Fri Oct 23 · 7:30pm / Sat Oct 24 · 2pm & 7:30pm / Sun Oct 25 · 2pm
David T. Little and Royce Vavrek’s opera is set at vinkensport, the Belgian folk contest that pits chaffinches and their owners against each other, each contestant tallying the calls of a rival’s bird. The competitors’ inner monologues and flashbacks reveal “deception, deep-seated rivalries, painful loneliness, and blossoming romance.” Lauren Lenz directs a spare Fringe staging, with student Ian Henscheid conducting and Allison Voth as music director.
Sun Oct 25 · 3:00pm
A string programme with music by Mendelssohn, Vivaldi and Bunch, among others, opening the three Musicians Unleashed chamber concerts of the Cape Ann Symphony's 75th season; the series continues with music by women composers in February and a brass programme in April. Yoichi Udagawa, the orchestra's music director, conducts.
Sun Oct 25 · 3:00pm
Osvaldo Gold, a Uruguayan-born guitarist who began studying at the Conservatorio Colon in Montevideo at eight, plays a recital for the Boston Classical Guitar Society. He performed across Europe from Paris before moving to the United States in 1982 to study at UC Santa Cruz. His repertoire runs from the Baroque to contemporary Latin American, European and American composers, and he helps run the University of Rhode Island Guitar Festival.
Sun Oct 25 · 3pm
Thomas Stumpf, the music department's staff pianist and co-director of its opera ensemble, plays a solo recital marking the 20th anniversary of the Granoff Music Center. The programme ranges across composers from six continents and sets them beside pieces by Tufts composers past and present. It is part of the department's Sunday Concert Series. Admission is free.
Sun Oct 25 · 2pm
Pianist Nan Ni, a member of the Brookline Music School faculty, plays music by Frescobaldi, Franck and Schubert in a recital titled Fantasy and Contemplation. It belongs to the school's Faculty Artist Concert Series, a run of Sunday-afternoon concerts by its teachers that continues in November and then monthly from January through April 2027.
Sun Oct 25 · 2pm
Fredrik Wanger plays a programme built around five linked lives: Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, and the two women whose artistry shaped them, Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann. Wanger taught piano for many years at the Boston University School for the Arts and has performed at Carnegie Hall, Town Hall and Jordan Hall, with tours of Europe, Canada and Israel.
Sun Oct 25 · 3:00pm
Pro Arte’s winds and brass open the orchestra’s 49th season with a programme spanning four centuries: Stravinsky’s Fanfare for a New Theatre for two trumpets, three of Giovanni Gabrieli’s brass canzonas written for St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, Mozart’s Serenade in C minor, K. 388, Stravinsky’s 1923 Octet, and George Enescu’s 1906 Dixtuor for ten winds, which looks back at the Classical serenade.
Sat Oct 24 – Sun Oct 25 · 4:00pm/5:00pm
Sat Oct 24 · 4:00pm, West Parish Church (Andover) / Sun Oct 25 · 5:00pm, St. Paul's Church (Brookline)
Opera composers come off the grand stage for chamber music: Verdi's rarely heard String Quartet, Respighi's Piano Quintet, a few arias with mezzo-soprano Kara Duga, and three two-minute commissions on Verdi's La Forza del Destino by Marti Epstein, Elena Ruehr and Elizabeth Brown. The players are violinists Sarita Kwok and Sammy Andonian, violist Stephanie Fong, cellist Hannah Collins, pianist Max Levinson and flutist Julie Scolnik, Mistral's artistic director.
$35
Sun Oct 25 · 3:00pm
The Boston Symphony Chamber Players, the ensemble of the orchestra's principal players founded in 1964, open their Sunday series with Elliott Carter's 1948 Woodwind Quintet and Mendelssohn's String Quintet No. 2 in B-flat, Op. 87. Boston pianist Randall Hodgkinson joins them for Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata, D. 821, written in 1824 for a six-string bowed instrument that fell out of use within a few years.
Series of 4 Sunday afternoons: $120-$204
Mon Oct 26 · 7:30pm
Violist Wenting Kang, who teaches at NEC, plays Schumann's Three Romances and selections from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet in Vadim Borisovsky's arrangement, then Britten's Third Suite for solo cello in Nobuko Imai's viola transcription and Stravinsky's Suite Italienne as arranged by Kim Kashkashian. All three arrangers are violists: Borisovsky was a founding member of the Beethoven Quartet, and Imai and Kashkashian are among the instrument's best-known soloists.
Tue Oct 27 · 6:30pm
Members of A Far Cry play a collection of fine violins in the workshop of master luthier and orchestra board member Chris Reuning, each instrument with its own voice — a chance to listen closely and rank them by value before the answers are revealed. Wine and hors d'oeuvres; a benefit for the orchestra, and expected to sell out.
Tue Oct 27 · 7:30pm
NEC's Wind Ensemble, one of the Conservatory's large wind groups alongside the Symphonic Winds, gives its autumn concert. Kevin Fitzgerald became NEC's director of wind ensembles this year, after serving as associate conductor of the Jacksonville Symphony and assistant conductor of the Alabama Symphony; he won a special prize for contemporary music at the 2023 Mahler Competition and founded ÆPEX Contemporary Performance.
Sep 29, Oct 6/13/20/27 · 12:15pm
Tue Sep 29 / Tue Oct 6 / Tue Oct 13 / Tue Oct 20 / Tue Oct 27 · 12:15pm
King's Chapel's midday series brings local and visiting musicians for 30 to 40 minutes of classical, jazz and popular music. The recitals listed here are Steven Young on the chapel's C.B. Fisk organ, Zoe Vandermeer on voice and harp, and violinist Miriam David; organist Giovanni Solinas and guitarist Warren Nicholson follow later in October. Each recital is also streamed, and the suggested $5 donation goes entirely to the musicians.
$5 suggested
Wed Oct 28 · 7:30pm
Two new works — Gabriela Lena Frank's Frida y Diego Suite of 2025 and a new double concerto by Derrick Skye — set against excerpts from Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette and music of Ravel. Hugh Wolff conducts the Philharmonia. Frank's suite takes Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as its subject.
Thu Oct 29 · 6:00pm
The Opera Department's twice-yearly scenes programme, drawing highlights from across the repertory — comedy and tragedy in short excerpts rather than a full staging. Joshua Major directs. An early start, at six. A scenes programme lets a department cast far more singers than a full staging would.
Thu Oct 29 · 7:30pm
Erica J. Washburn, NEC's director of choral activities, conducts the NEC Chamber Singers, a choir of 24 to 30 students open to every major at the Conservatory. The ensemble sings challenging works from all periods, with particular emphasis on a cappella music of the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, rehearses three times a week and usually performs in the round.
Thu Oct 29
The Boston Pops presents its third annual Día de Muertos concert, a celebration of Mexican music with Boston's Mexican community — a festival of life, death and remembrance, and the orchestra's own yearly turn toward Mexican song. Keith Lockhart conducts, with the Mexican singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada.
Thu Oct 29 · 7:00pm
Alarm Will Sound, the New York ensemble directed by Alan Pierson, performs Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain (2000), a work for 24 players in which the hall lights are switched off and on as part of the score, so long stretches are played in darkness. The Austrian composer built it from microtonal and overtone harmony, and has tied it to the far right's entry into Austria's government that year.
Fri Oct 30 · 1:00pm
The Rhythm Method, a New York string quartet of four performer-composers, plays contemporary music including new pieces by Berklee writing students, as part of its residency in the college’s Professional Writing and Music Technology Division. The quartet sets out to reimagine the string quartet “in a contemporary, feminist context,” using improvisation, vocalization and graphic notation, and has played Roulette, Joe’s Pub and the Met Museum.
Fri Oct 30 · 7:30pm
The third annual festival brings roughly 200 singers together, 150 of them students, for Jonathan Dove's The Passing of the Year, two pieces by Arianne Abela — I Love You Like a Rainbow and Because You Sang — and Franck's Psalm 150. Noah Horn conducts.
Fri Oct 30 · 12pm
Hammers and Reeds, the duo of saxophonist Philipp Stäudlin, who teaches classical saxophone at Tufts, and pianist Yoko Hagino, plays new works by Tufts composers in the first of this season's New at Noon concerts, the department's midday series of music by its composers. Admission is free, with no tickets required.
Fri Oct 30 · 7:30pm
The Tufts University Wind Ensemble, the university's student band of wind, brass and percussion players, gives a concert under its director Ray Daniels celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Perry and Marty Granoff Music Center, which opened in 2006 as the home of the music department. Admission is free, with no tickets required.
Fri Oct 30 – Sat Oct 31 · 7:30pm/1:30pm
Fri Oct 30 · 7:30pm / Sat Oct 31 · 1:30pm
Disney and Pixar's Coco shown in full while the Boston Pops plays the score live to the film — Miguel's journey into the colorful Land of the Dead to uncover the truth of his family's history. Keith Lockhart conducts the Boston Pops.
Sat Oct 31 · 10:00am
Seymour Barab's one-act Little Red Riding Hood is the other half of NEC's annual touring children's opera, a collaboration between the Conservatory's opera department and its Community Performances and Partnerships program. Barab, an American cellist, wrote dozens of short operas. The show runs about 50 minutes, is meant for children of all ages, and audiences are invited to come in Halloween costume.
Oct 30, Nov 1 · 7:30pm/2pm
Fri Oct 30 · 7:30pm, Nathaniel Allen House (Newton) / Sun Nov 1 · 2pm, Emmanuel Church Parish Hall (Boston)
Violinists Susanna Ogata and Jesse Irons with Andrus Madsen play the scordatura two-violin sonatas from Johann Pachelbel's Musikalische Ergotzung — the composer behind the famous Canon in a far stranger light. Newton on Oct 30, Boston's Emmanuel Church on Nov 1.
Oct 7, Nov 11, Dec 2 · 12:15pm
Wed Oct 7 / Wed Nov 11 / Wed Dec 2 · 12:15pm
Carson Cooman, Composer in Residence at the Memorial Church and a Research Associate in Music at Harvard, shares a 45-minute midday recital with David von Behren, Assistant University Organist and Choirmaster. Cooman is an organist as well as a composer, with a catalogue running to well over a thousand works, and specialises in performing new music for the organ.
Sun Sep 20 – Sun May 9
Since 1970 Emmanuel Music has performed a Bach cantata inside the Sunday liturgy rather than on a concert platform, and describes itself as the only organisation in the world doing so regularly. The cantata falls just before the closing hymn of the 10am Eucharist. Ryan Turner conducts, with guest conductors through the season.
Oct 16, Dec 4, Jan 15, Apr 9, Jun 4 · 11:00am
Fri Oct 16 / Fri Dec 4 / Fri Jan 15 / Fri Apr 9 / Fri Jun 4 · 11:00am
Violist Scott Woolweaver and musical friends play classical chamber works over lunch, with anecdotes about the composers along the way. Each hour-long session comes with a luncheon, coffee and tea. The 2026–27 series meets on five Fridays, in October, December, January, April and June, and tickets are sold singly or as a subscription to all five.
$40 per luncheon; $160 for all five
Sun Nov 1 · 1:30pm
The Jamaican-British composer Eleanor Alberga plays her own chamber music: her three string quartets and the Second Piano Quintet, 'Stark,' on its world-premiere tour. The Green Room Ensemble — violinists Thomas Bowes and Nathan Meltzer, violist Jordan Bak and cellist Sterling Elliott — joins her.
Sun Nov 1 · 3:00pm
The Colombian cellist plays Debussy's D minor Sonata, Ginastera's Op. 49, Pärt's Fratres and Shostakovich's Cello Sonata, with one of his own compositions, Ad Noctem, among them. The Strad called him "technically flawless… totally under the skin of the composers' idioms."
Sun Nov 1 · 4:00pm
Pianist Pavel Nersessian pairs Mendelssohn's six Songs Without Words and Rondo capriccioso with Fauré's songs without words, two valses-caprices, the second Barcarolle and two pieces from Pelléas et Mélisande, then ends on Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit. Nersessian taught at the Moscow Conservatory for more than three decades, assisting Sergei Dorensky with students including Nikolai Lugansky and Denis Matsuev, and won the Dublin International Piano Competition in 1991.
Sun Nov 1 · 3:00pm
The Lydian String Quartet's Beethoven+ series pairs Beethoven's first published quartet, Op. 18 No. 1 in F major, with his first Razumovsky quartet, Op. 59 No. 1. Between them comes Iris ter Schiphorst's Und doch…, written with Op. 18 No. 1 as its reference point and described by the German composer as "an attempt to draw a very personal trace of memory." The Lydian is Brandeis University's quartet in residence.
From $10.00
Sun Nov 1 · 3:00pm
MetWinds' first concert under new Music Director Gabe Southard is built on firsts, most of them the first works John Mackey, Frank Ticheli, Dana Wilson and others wrote or arranged for band: Mackey's Strange Humors, Ticheli's Postcard, Wilson's Piece of Mind, Adam Gorb's Awayday and John Stevens's Benediction. Holst's First Suite in E♭, which helped establish the wind band as a serious ensemble, anchors the programme.
$20 adult; $15 senior; $5 student; under 5 free
Sun Nov 1 · 3pm
Duo Maresienne, Carol Lewis on viola da gamba and Olav Chris Henriksen on theorbo and lute, plays Italian music of the late Renaissance and Baroque by Frescobaldi, Piccinini, Selma, Rogniono, Corelli and Fontanelli. The duo takes its name from the French composer and gambist Marin Marais, and the concert is the second in the museum’s Sunday-afternoon early-music series.
Mon Nov 2 · 7:30pm
This month's programme is built around Budapest's Liszt Academy. The violinist and NEC alumna Tessa Lark plays Bartók's Romanian Folk Dances with the pianist Alessio Bax and traditional American tunes with violinist Eden Mac-Adam-Somer and cellist Mike Block. Soprano Dani Zhang sings Liszt's Oh! Quand je dors and Pace non trovo, and Bax anchors Dohnányi's Sextet, Op. 37, with faculty strings, clarinet and horn.
Mon Nov 2 · 7:00pm
Catherine Weinfield-Zell builds her Longy faculty debut, with a wind quintet, entirely from living composers: Valerie Coleman's Tzigane, Oscar Navarro's Juego de Ladrones and Paquito D'Rivera's Aires Tropicales, which bring Cuban dance rhythms, Roma-inflected writing and the sweep of a film score to the woodwind quintet. Longy frames the program as a picture of how the form has changed in recent years.
Wed Nov 4 · 7:30pm
David Loebel conducts the NEC Philharmonia, one of the conservatory's student orchestras, in music from Eastern Europe: Smetana, Bartók and Requiem Fragments of 2008 by Kati Agócs, the Canadian-American composer who teaches composition at NEC. The listing names Smetana and Bartók without their individual works. Loebel, formerly music director of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, is on the conservatory's orchestral conducting faculty.
Wed Nov 4 · 12:10pm
NAMI is an audiovisual collaboration between composer and guitarist Christine Southworth, an MIT graduate of 2002, and the artist and photographer Jun Hoshino. Hoshino's unfiltered iPhone footage of New England ponds and streams is turned into sound through Southworth's data sonifications, then layered with electric guitar, giving each video its own soundscape. The half-hour midday series is presented by MIT's Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life.
Wed Nov 4 · 12:15pm
Pianist Will Cesta gives this free midday recital in the Memorial Church’s lunchtime series, a run of 45-minute concerts that this season is otherwise played largely on the church’s organs, most often by Carson Cooman, its composer in residence, and David von Behren, Assistant University Organist and Choirmaster.
Nov 5–6/8
Thu Nov 5 · 7:30pm / Fri Nov 6 · 7:30pm / Sun Nov 8 · 3pm
André Previn's operatic setting of Tennessee Williams's play: the self-deluding Blanche DuBois takes shelter with her sister Stella and the brutish Stanley, and unravels. Daniela Candillari conducts and Patricia Racette directs, with Brittany Renee, Angela Yam, Thomas Glass and Brenton Ryan in the cast.
Thu Nov 5 – Sat Nov 7
Thu Nov 5 · 7:30pm / Fri Nov 6 · 1:30pm / Sat Nov 7 · 8pm
Haydn's oratorio The Creation, a setting of the Genesis story for three vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra, from its famous orchestral picture of chaos to two hours of plain delight in the new world. It opens two weeks the BSO gives over to creation, paired the following week with a new Golijov commission.
Thu Nov 5 · 7:00pm
Bridgewater State University’s Wind Ensemble, directed by Donald Running, plays a programme of large-ensemble pieces by several composers. The group’s repertoire spans classic and contemporary wind-band literature, from standards by Holst, Grainger, Sousa and Alfred Reed to local, regional and world premieres, and its concerts often feature faculty and students as soloists. Admission is free, with no tickets required.
Thu Nov 5 · 7:30pm
Che Li, an Artist Diploma pianist at Boston University and a student of Pavel Nersessian, plays a solo recital of works by Haydn, Prokofiev and Liszt as winner of the 2026 Richmond Piano Competition. The annual competition, open to every piano performance major in the School of Music, was established by the Boston philanthropist and music lover Aaron Richmond.
Thu Nov 5 · 6:30pm
Pianist Lucas Kamon gives a solo classical recital. Kamon earned his degree in piano performance at the University of New Hampshire, where he studied with Philip Solomonick and Mathilde Handelsman, has given more than 200 performances across New England, and teaches piano through the UNH Piano Extension Program and the Seacoast Academy of Music. No registration is required.
Fri Nov 6 · 7:00pm
Castle of our Skins takes the 1926 literary magazine Fire!! as its starting point, in an evening that is part concert, part conversation and part salon, with musicians, writers and audience in one room. The group frames it around Black artists who have expanded the boundaries of form.
Fri Nov 6 · 8:00pm
The Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra plays Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila overture, Stravinsky's Petrushka and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. The BPYO draws its players from across greater Boston and gives its subscription concerts in Symphony Hall, on the same stage as the senior orchestra.
Fri Nov 6 – Sat Nov 7
Singers from NEC's Undergraduate Opera Studio, an auditioned programme for voice majors who have passed their first-year promotional exam, perform staged scenes from the opera repertoire, mixing tragedy and comedy, across two nights. Steven Goldstein directs and Justin Williams is music director; the studio is led by its artistic director, Michael Meraw.
Fri Nov 6 · 7:30pm
A programme built around text and the singing voice across a century of American writing. Anthony De Ritis opens with Jiggedy Jingle Jaunty; soprano Julia Bullock then joins the orchestra for Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and a selection from Matthew Aucoin's opera The No One's Rose.
Fri Nov 6
Bridgewater State University’s Chorale, directed by Bradford Dumont, sings a mix of classical and contemporary pieces. Open to anyone in the university community, the Chorale is the larger choir from which the auditioned, largely a cappella Chamber Singers are drawn, and the university’s choral forces have recently sung Mozart’s Requiem, Haydn’s Creation and Fauré’s Requiem. Admission is free, with no tickets required.
Fri Nov 6 · 7:00pm
The American premiere of William Basinski's Garden of Brokenness, a live realisation of the tape-loop lamentation he first recorded on piano in 1979, twenty years after its release and a season after its Venice Biennale premiere. Basinski performs with pianist Adam Tendler, BSO percussionists and additional pianists, inside a light-and-space design by A.J. Weissbard that turns the room into the garden itself. Part of the BSO's Creation Festival.
Fri Nov 6 · 8:00pm
Janáček's String Quartet No. 1, written in 1923 and titled after Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata about a jealous husband, is paired with Beethoven's Quartet No. 8 in E minor, Op. 59 No. 2, one of three quartets for Count Razumovsky. Peter Zazofsky, a Montreal Competition winner and Muir Quartet member, and BSO violinist Tatiana Dimitriades play violins, with BSO violist Danny Kim and cellist Jonathan Miller.
Fri Nov 6 · 8pm
Boston University’s Center for New Music marks the release of Only the Path Remains, a new Albany Records album by composer and pianist Ketty Nez, a member of BU’s composition faculty, with a concert of music from the recording. Nez’s work draws on folk traditions and musical heritage, exploring “questions of memory, cultural identity, family history, and musical tradition.”
Fri Nov 6 – Sun Nov 8
Fri Nov 6 · 7:30pm / Sat Nov 7 · 3:00pm & 7:30pm / Sun Nov 8 · 3:00pm
Opera Cambridge, formerly Cambridge Chamber Ensemble, stages Kurt Weill's Down in the Valley in an evening of Weill titled Coming to America. Inspired by Weill's love of American folk songs, the short opera, written in 1948 to a libretto by Arnold Sundgaard, tells the story of the doomed love between Brack and Jenny. The company's production of Handel's Samson won first place in The American Prize in Opera Performance.
$45 general; $35 seniors/students; $8 Card to Culture; children 6–12 free
Fri Nov 6 · 7pm
Worcester Chamber Music Society musicians Krista Buckland Reisner (violin), Mark Berger (viola), Joshua Gordon (cello) and Randall Hodgkinson (piano) play Martinů’s Three Madrigals, H.313, which blend the English madrigal with Bohemian and Moravian folk music; Beethoven’s Cello Sonata in D major, Op. 102 No. 2, written after a three-year break from composing, that ushered in his late style; and Saint-Saëns’s Piano Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 41.
$30 – $40
Sat Nov 7 · 7:30pm
Two works sprung from Luther's hymn 'A Mighty Fortress' — Bach's cantata Ein feste Burg, BWV 80, and Julius Eastman's Gay Guerrilla — with inti figgis-vizueta's Talamh opening the programme. A Far Cry is joined by the Boston Children's Chorus and four vocal soloists.
Sat Nov 7 · 7:30pm
William Christie and Paul Agnew direct Les Arts Florissants together for the first time since the ensemble's fortieth anniversary in 2019, in a programme of Monteverdi madrigals running from pure polyphony to elaborate dance settings. It ends with Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda.
Sat Nov 7 · 7:00pm
The New Gallery Concert Series, which sets new music beside new visual art and brings its makers into the room, opens its 27th season with work by the visual artist Audrey Goldstein. The title borrows charm and strange, two of the six types of quark, which never stand alone in nature; the evening’s themes run from motherhood and grief to shadows, time and prayer.
Sat Nov 7 · 7:30pm
Three orchestral depictions: Richard Strauss's tone poem Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, about the German folk prankster, Debussy's La Mer, and Giya Kancheli's Styx, which portrays the crossing of the river to the land of the dead. Styx is scored for solo viola, chorus and orchestra; the orchestra's principal violist, Emily Rideout, is the soloist, with the New World Chorale under artistic director Holly Krafka.
Sat Nov 7 · 7:30pm
Adam Cicchillitti and Steve Cowan won Classical Recording of the Year at the 2021 East Coast Music Awards for their debut album FOCUS, which American Record Guide credited with “sensitive, authoritative, au courant playing.” Their album Intimate Impressions arranges piano, harp and guitar music from 20th-century Paris, and in 2022–23 they took on six new commissions for two guitars and orchestra with Ottawa's 13 Strings.
Sat Nov 7 · 8:00pm
Palaver Strings, the Grammy-nominated string ensemble from Portland, Maine, frames I Believed in Magic as an evening of retold bedtime stories on gender, power, fear and desire. It includes two premieres, Teagan Faran's Fíjate, a tango-inflected answer to Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique told from the pursued woman's side, and Xenia St. Charles Iris Llyllyth's Canary Resuscitator, alongside Florence Price, Nina Shekhar and Mary Kouyoumdjian.
Sat Nov 7 · 8:00pm
Compagnie Hervé Koubi opens The Platform, Global Arts Live's new venue, with the Boston premiere of Sol Invictus, named for the “invincible sun” deity of ancient Rome. Koubi's choreography mixes contemporary dance, capoeira and urban dance, set here to a score by Mikael Karlsson with excerpts by Steve Reich and Maxime Bodson. The New Yorker wrote that his dancers “could be mistaken for gods.”
Sun Nov 8 · 1:30pm
Beethoven's last string quartet, Op. 135, and Prokofiev's First, Op. 50, with two recent works: Sky Macklay's Many Many Cadences and a new commission from Jeff Scott, the founding horn player of Imani Winds. The Poiesis Quartet, founded in 2022, plays.
Sun Nov 8 · 3:00pm
Forty-eight cellos and nothing else, conducted by Eugene Friesen, marking 150 years since the birth of Pablo Casals in arrangements of Casals's own music, Villa-Lobos and other favourites. The cello's range overlaps the human voice, so a full ensemble of them sits closer to choral sound than to an orchestra.
Sun Nov 8
Brahms's Tragic Overture opens, then Beethoven's Triple Concerto with Alex Kerr, violin, Emmanuel Feldman, cello, and the pianist Joy Cline Phinney — a work that asks three soloists to share the foreground. Stravinsky's Petrushka closes. Francisco Noya conducts the orchestra, which was founded in 1924.
$11.50–$46.50
Sun Nov 8 · 7:30pm
Pianist Minsoo Sohn plays the whole of Book 1 of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier in one Jordan Hall evening — twenty-four preludes and fugues, one pair in every major and minor key, written in 1722 as a demonstration that the thing could be done.
Sun Nov 8 · 3:00 PM
An outdoor concert at Faneuil Hall for the Revolution's 250th anniversary, opening with William Schuman's 1956 variations on 'Chester' — the marching song of the Revolution, written by the Boston composer William Billings — and continuing through works by four American composers on history, place and memory. The ensemble plays at the seat of the history it is marking.
Sun Nov 8 · 3:00pm
Beethoven's E minor Quartet, Op. 59 No. 2, written for Count Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador in Vienna, and quoting a Russian folk tune, shares the programme with Janáček's First Quartet of 1923, which takes its title and its story of jealousy from Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata. The players are violinists Peter Zazofsky and Tatiana Dimitriades, violist Danny Kim and cellist Jonathan Miller, the ensemble's artistic director.
Sun Nov 8 · 2:00pm
An all-British programme opens with the Symphony No. 4 of William Boyce, an 18th-century English composer, followed by Britten's Four Sea Interludes, the orchestral scenes of Dawn, Sunday Morning, Moonlight and Storm drawn from his opera Peter Grimes. It closes with Vaughan Williams's Symphony No. 5, premiered in 1943 in the middle of the Second World War. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, with a reception afterwards.
Sun Nov 8 · 3pm
A concert marking the retirement of composer and pianist John McDonald, now professor emeritus, after 36 years at Tufts, 20 of them in the Granoff Music Center. Colleagues, friends and former students join him in compositions, improvisations and what the department calls “comprovisations” and “imprositions,” for, by and with McDonald. Admission is free, with no tickets required.
Mon Nov 9 · 7:30pm
Pianist Clayton Stephenson, who in 2022 became the first Black finalist at the Van Cliburn Competition, gives a recital as a member of NEC's Institute for Concert Artists, the Conservatory's two-year Artist Diploma course. A graduate of the Harvard–NEC dual-degree programme, he won the inaugural Nina Simone Piano Competition and an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2024 and has appeared with the Houston and Cincinnati symphonies.
Mon Nov 9 · 7:30pm
The Boston University Symphony Orchestra and Treble Choirs, conducted by Sarah Ioannides, give a programme of works by Elfrida Andrée, the Swedish composer and women’s rights advocate, with soprano Kristine Nowlain. It includes the world premiere of I Templet and U.S. premieres of the Minuet and Till Näktergalen, and ends with Andrée’s Suffrage Cantata (1911), heard for the first time on the East Coast.
Nov 9/12, Feb 25, Mar 2/7
Mon Nov 9 · 7:30pm / Thu Nov 12 · 7:30pm / Thu Feb 25 · 7:30pm / Tue Mar 2 · 7:30pm / Sun Mar 7 · 8:00pm
Students chosen from NEC's College and Preparatory School play Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas, the subject of six Piano Department concerts this year and of a series that will cover all 555 of them over four years. Each year the department marks an anniversary, celebrates a composer or explores a theme; Bruce Brubaker, NEC's Curator of Piano Programming, oversees the concerts.
Tue Nov 10 · 6:30pm
French tenor Morgan Manifacier and pianist Corinne Penner trace Paul Verlaine's poetry through its musical settings, on an international tour marking 130 years since his death: songs by Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Hahn, Poldowski, Tosti and Britten, ending with Fauré's La Bonne Chanson, Op. 61, on nine of Verlaine's poems. Both teach at Baylor University; Manifacier is a two-time American Prize winner in voice.
Tue Nov 10 · 6:00pm
Bass-baritone Davóne Tines, with pianist John Bitoy, sits down with composer-pianist Vijay Iyer to ask what creation actually sounds like, and answers in performance rather than argument. Excerpts from Osvaldo Golijov's new Creation sit beside Beethoven, Schumann, Duke Ellington, Alice Coltrane and Philip Glass, with improvisation between. An evening-length Creation Festival event in Harvard's Paine Hall.
Wed Nov 11 · 7:30pm
Paul Biss conducts the NEC Symphony, the Conservatory's second full orchestra alongside the Philharmonia. Biss, a violinist and violist who taught at Indiana University before joining the NEC faculty, is one of the Symphony's regular conductors; he is married to the violinist Miriam Fried, and their son is the pianist Jonathan Biss. Admission is free, with a ticket.
Thu Nov 12 – Sat Nov 14
Thu Nov 12 · 7:30pm / Fri Nov 13 · 7:30pm / Sat Nov 14 · 8pm
Osvaldo Golijov's Creation, a BSO commission answering Haydn's oratorio of the same name from the week before, sets a concept by the playwright David Henry Hwang with lyrics by Leah Hager Cohen, drawing on popular and traditional music from around the world. Golijov wrote the earlier La Pasión según San Marcos.
Thu Nov 12 · 7:30pm
Joshua Roach conducts the Boston University Wind Ensemble as it concludes its America 250 celebration: William Bolcom’s Liberty Enlightening the World, in a new critical edition Roach prepared, William Schuman’s George Washington Bridge and Bernstein’s Three Dance Episodes from On the Town, in Lavender’s arrangement. Pianist Antian Ye plays Gershwin’s Prelude II and then Donald Grantham’s Fantasy Variations on it.
Fri Nov 13 · 8:00pm
Vivaldi's The Four Seasons anchors the U.S. debut of Double Sens, the chamber ensemble the Serbian-born, Paris-based violinist Nemanja Radulović founded from a circle of Serbian and French musicians. The group moves between classical repertoire and folk traditions across the evening.
Fri Nov 13 – Sat Nov 14 · 7:30pm
Fri Nov 13 / Sat Nov 14 · 7:30pm
Boston Baroque's chamber ensemble spans four centuries of Italian music — Vivaldi, Albinoni, Castello and Handel beside rarities by Maria Teresa Agnesi and Antonio Archilei — with Grammy-winning soprano Amanda Forsythe and gambist Cristiano Contadin. Colin Jacobsen's new Morgantina Studies closes the evening.
Fri Nov 13 · 5:30pm
The early-music ensemble A Golden Wire takes Plato's Timæus and the 'music of the spheres' as the frame for an hour of Elizabethan and Jacobean song and Italian instrumental music, in the Athenaeum's Long Room. Part of the BSO's Creation Festival, the programme argues the ancient case that the proportions of the scale are the proportions of the cosmos, and that harmony shapes planets and bodies alike.
Fri Nov 13 · 12pm
The second New at Noon programme, subtitled “Organ-ized Chaos,” presents new works by Tufts composers played by two composer-performers, John McDonald, professor emeritus of composition, at the piano and Will Cooper at the organ. It is held in Goddard Chapel rather than the Granoff Music Center. Admission is free, with no tickets required.
Fri Nov 13 · 8pm
Cellist Kee Kim, Professor of Music at Harvard and a member of the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet, joins Victor Cayres, a lecturer in piano and collaborative piano at Boston University. They open with Nadia Boulanger’s three short pieces, then play three cello sonatas: one by Beethoven, Debussy’s of 1915 and Prokofiev’s of 1949, written for the young Rostropovich.
Fri Nov 13 · 7:30pm
Contralto Vira Slywotzky and Georgian-American pianist Ana Glig, joined by cellist Miriam Eckelhoefer, perform songs by women composers past and present, among them Alma Mahler, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Florence Price, Augusta Holmès, Meri Davitashvili, Vivian Fung, Lori Laitman and Martha Redbone. The performers introduce the works. Slywotzky, who founded the series in 2018, was the sole US representative at the 2009 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World.
Fri Nov 13 – Sat Nov 14 · 8:00pm
Fri Nov 13 / Sat Nov 14 · 8:00pm
Jean Appolon Expressions, the Boston company of Haitian-born choreographer Jean Appolon, gives the world premiere of Pouvwa (Power), an immersive evening built from Haitian folkloric dance, Afro-electronica, live drumming and visual installations. The piece takes up the misuse of power and how it might be used for the common good. It was made with support from the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project.
Sat Nov 14 · 8:00pm
Julia Wolfe's Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio sets coal miners' oral histories, speeches and advertisements to amplified chamber music, performed by New York's Bang on a Can All-Stars with Chorus Pro Musica. The Boston premiere is one night only at the Cutler Majestic, conducted by Jamie Kirsch.
Sat Nov 14 – Sun Nov 15 · 7pm/3:30pm
Sat Nov 14 · 7pm, Friends Meeting House (Cambridge) / Sun Nov 15 · 3:30pm, Follen Church (Lexington)
Music tied to the Nordic countries from the early baroque to the present: Samuel Friedrich Capricornus's Amor tuus in nos (1655), a sonata by Samuel Adam Strungk, Grieg's Haugtussa songs and Solveig's Song, Erik Tulindberg's String Quartet No. 2, and songs by ABBA and Björk. Soprano Carley DeFranco and mezzo-soprano Krista River sing. The programme repeats at Follen Church in Lexington.
$26 advance / $30 door ($10 under-35 & students)
Sat Nov 14 · 7:30pm
The Apollo Ensemble of Boston and music director Elias Miller give the world premiere of a new work by Yangfan Xu, a Juilliard graduate and doctoral candidate at New England Conservatory whose music has been played by the New Jersey Symphony and New York City Ballet. Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony, written in Dresden a decade after the failure of his First, follows. The dress rehearsal the night before is open.
Sat Nov 14 – Sun Nov 15
Sat Nov 14 / Sun Nov 15
A two-day festival led by Bridgewater State’s Social Justice Choir of Southeastern New England, joined by singers from UMass Dartmouth and the wider community in what the university calls “music with a message.” The choir rehearses and performs music that carries a message of social justice, including repertoire by underrepresented composers, and takes part in non-musical projects that benefit the communities it shares. Admission is free.
Sat Nov 14 · 1:00pm
Richard Eyre's Met production of Bizet's opera, recorded in January 2010 and brought back to the Kendall Square screen as part of the Live in HD series' twentieth-anniversary season. Elīna Garanča is the cigarette girl who lives and dies on her own terms, Roberto Alagna the soldier who cannot let her go. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted, in his first Met season.
Sat Nov 14 – Sun Nov 15 · 7pm/1pm
Sat Nov 14 · 7pm / Sun Nov 15 · 1pm
Lam Dance Works, the company led by John Lam, presents six works new to Boston: Yury Yanowsky's Bathers, Ken Ossola's Moving Mountains, Jon Ole Olstad's Dust and Water, Robert Stephen's re:connection, Chloe Crenshaw's Synthetica and Ali Cederholm's Cisne. Yanowsky is a former Boston Ballet principal, Ossola and Olstad danced with Nederlands Dans Theater, and Stephen was a first soloist with the National Ballet of Canada.
Sat Nov 14 · 7:30pm
For the Vista Philharmonic, Groton Hill's resident orchestra, Bruce Hangen has programmed Joseph Bologne's Symphony No. 1, Op. 11, by the Mozart contemporary who was the first composer of African descent to win wide acclaim in Europe, alongside Beethoven's Symphony No. 8 and Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony, new to the orchestra. Concertmaster Alice Hallstrom is soloist in Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 4 in D major, her solo debut in the work.
Sat Nov 14 · 8pm
Students in the five-year Tufts/NEC dual-degree program, who study at Tufts and at New England Conservatory at the same time, give an evening that mixes classical repertoire, jazz and their own compositions. The concert is free and needs no ticket.
Sat Nov 14 · 4:00pm
UMass Lowell's The Common Voice Community Chorus is joined by choirs from across New England for a festival concert of community singing. The programme builds to a closing performance by the New England Community Choir Festival Chorus, a massed choir of well over 200 voices drawn from around the region and brought together on one stage.
Sat Nov 14 · 4:00pm
Soprano Sonja Dutoit Tengblad sings new works for voice and chamber ensemble by three Boston-based composers: Dan Van Hassel, and two from the Hills Church's own community, Eun Young Lee and Will Cooper. The concert, presented under the name Mission Ammonia, is part of the church's Saturdays at 4 series.
Sun Nov 15 · 1:30pm
The Lysander Trio, formed at Juilliard, plays Dvořák's F-minor Piano Trio, Op. 65, alongside a trio by the Swedish composer Amanda Maier, who knew Brahms and Grieg, a Grieg andante, and Bongani Ndodana-Breen's Two Nguni Dances, a Gardner commission drawing on southern African music.
Sun Nov 15 · 3:00pm
Brahms's Third Quartet, Op. 67, and Dvořák's C-major Eleventh, Op. 61, flank an orchestration by Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate of Indigenous singer-songwriter Pura Fé's Rattle Songs. The Dover Quartet, Joel Link, Bryan Lee, Julianne Lee and Camden Shaw, plays.
Sun Nov 15 · 3:00pm
Beethoven's first published work, the E-flat Piano Trio, Op. 1 No. 1, opens a programme that takes in Dvořák's Terzetto for two violins and viola, Op. 74 and closes with the B minor Clarinet Quintet Brahms wrote late, which the Society describes as wrapping the listener in an autumnal atmosphere.
Sun Nov 15 · 4:00pm
Baroque chamber music on period instruments, drawn from repertoire the ensemble has rediscovered rather than from the standard concert list. Musicians of the Old Post Road takes its name from the colonial road between Boston and New York, and has built its programmes on recovered works since the late 1980s.
Sun Nov 15 · 2:00pm
The Endicott Singers and the Chamber Ensemble, student ensembles at Endicott College, share an afternoon of music inspired by dance that celebrates “rhythms from around the world.”
Sun Nov 15 · 7:30 PM
Violinist Yevgeny Kutik plays with Boston pianist Dina Vainshtein. The New York Times credited Kutik with a 'dark-hued tone and razor-sharp technique'; he programmes new commissions alongside standard repertoire and is artistic director and co-founder of the Birch Festival. Vainshtein has won special awards as a chamber-music partner and works widely with string players in the city.
Sun Nov 15 · 2:00pm
The Hampton Trio, with Beverly Davis on classical guitar, Mark Davis on mandolin and Robert Margo on mandola in G, plays original music and arrangements from baroque to contemporary for that plucked-string combination, following the example of Japan's Trio Nuovo and Spain's Trio Chamorro. Mark Davis also directs the Providence Mandolin Orchestra; Margo is a two-time prize winner at the Classical Mandolin Society of America's national competition.
Sun Nov 15 · 3pm
The Tufts Concert Choir and Chamber Singers perform together under Jamie Kirsch, who directs both choirs, in the music department's Sunday Concert Series. The afternoon comes in the Granoff Music Center's 20th-anniversary season, which the department is marking this fall with anniversary concerts by its wind ensemble, jazz orchestra, opera ensemble and flute ensemble. Admission is free, with no tickets required.
Sun Nov 15 · 3pm
Fred Springer, a Boston-based classical guitarist, has performed across the United States and in Argentina, Canada and Switzerland, and has won top prizes in international guitar, ensemble and mixed-instrument competitions. He studied at the University of Texas at Austin and Columbus State University, and teaches for the Kithara Project, which gives tuition-free classical guitar lessons to underserved young people, and at EKS Music School.
Sun Nov 15 · 3:00pm
The Ringers, a Boston brass ensemble founded and directed by horn player Jack Krugman to explore new music for brass, gives a brass quintet concert. Krugman trained at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, where he studied with Eli Epstein and later took a Performance Diploma, and has held principal and section horn positions with the New England Philharmonic and the Boston Civic Symphony.
Sun Nov 15 · 7:30pm
Guest conductor Ken-David Masur leads a programme for György Kurtág's 100th birthday, built around his Scenes from a Novel for soprano, violin, bass and cimbalom, sung by Artistic Partners Tony Arnold and Kebra-Seyoun Charles. Around it come Collage-commissioned world premieres by Peter Child and Eun Young Lee (Minhwa), two of Charles's own songs, two Kurtág miniatures and a movement of Eric Nathan's Short Stories.
$35 general; $15 students
Sun Nov 15 · 3pm
The Brandeis University Chorus, a mixed choir open to the whole Brandeis community, joins the Chamber Singers, directed by Robert Duff, for an afternoon of choral music presented by the Music Department. Admission is free; walk-ins are welcome, an RSVP on Eventbrite reserves a seat, and the concert is also livestreamed on the department's webpage.
Sun Nov 15 · 4pm
The Harvard University Choir and Orchestra perform Benjamin Britten's St. Nicolas, with tenor Jonas Budris in the title role. Britten wrote the cantata in 1948, to a text by Eric Crozier, for the centenary of Lancing College; it tells the life and legends of the fourth-century bishop of Myra, and the score has the audience join the choir in two hymns. The concert is also streamed on YouTube.
Mon Nov 16 · 7:30pm
NEC's period-instrument orchestra gives its autumn concert. The ensemble belongs to the Pratt Early Music Program, which Harold I. Pratt and Frances G. Pratt endowed to bring historically informed performance, visiting scholars and master classes to the Conservatory. Admission is free and open to the public, with no ticket required.
Tue Nov 17 · 8:00 PM
Boris Berman has played in more than fifty countries and recorded the complete piano works of Prokofiev and the Scriabin sonatas. He heads the piano department at Yale, and his books Notes from the Pianist's Bench and A Guide to Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas are standard reading for students. Michael Lewin directs the series.
Wed Nov 18 · 3:00pm
The Berklee Flute Choir and the Autumn Winds and Piano Ensemble play under the direction of the woodwind professor Wendy Rolfe, in a programme the school describes as running from Bach to contemporary writing and from Romantic repertoire to Latin American music.
Wed Nov 18 · 7:00pm
The Phoenix-based Driftwood Quintet plays chamber arrangements made by its own members, ranging across orchestral and piano repertoire and into the soundtracks of films and video games. The group describes its remit as crossing genres and bending boundaries in classical music. Admission is free, with reservations encouraged.
Wed Nov 18 · 7:30pm
The NEC Chamber Orchestra plays without a conductor: its members are chosen by audition each autumn and stay together for the year, and the leadership rotates for every work so that each player takes responsibility for musical decisions. Donald Palma, a double bassist and founding member of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, is its artistic director.
Wed Nov 18 · 8pm
Student chamber ensembles from the Tufts Department of Music play works for strings, winds, brass and piano. Admission is free and no tickets are required.
Thu Nov 19 – Sat Nov 21
Thu Nov 19 · 7:30pm / Fri Nov 20 · 1:30pm / Sat Nov 21 · 8pm
Jan Lisiecki plays Mendelssohn's First Piano Concerto, written in the composer's early twenties, between Weber's overture to Oberon, finished in the last year of his life, and Schumann's First Symphony, the Spring, his first successful orchestral score. Samy Rachid conducts this early German Romantic programme.
Thu Nov 19 · 7:30pm
Berklee’s Concert Choir, a student ensemble, sings traditional, classical and choral literature in the first of two concerts under this title this season; the second follows in April. Admission is free.
Thu Nov 19 – Sun Nov 22
Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel, staged by the Opera Department over four nights. Written in 1893, it puts Wagner-scale orchestration behind a fairy tale, and is the one opera in the standard repertory aimed as squarely at families as at opera-goers.
Thu Nov 19 · 7:30pm
Saxophonist Kenneth Radnofsky and colleagues play Schoenberg and works written in his wake. At 6pm a new documentary about the composer is screened, followed by a panel moderated by Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker and author of The Rest Is Noise, with Schoenberg's son Larry among the panellists. Radnofsky founded the World-Wide Concurrent Premieres and Commissioning Fund.
Thu Nov 19 – Sun Nov 22
Thu Nov 19 · 7:30pm / Fri Nov 20 · 7:30pm / Sat Nov 21 · 7:30pm / Sun Nov 22 · 2pm
Puccini's 1896 opera about four young artists sharing a cold Paris garret, and the seamstress Mimì who comes to the door for a light and dies of consumption four acts later. It is among the most performed operas anywhere. The Conservatory stages it over four nights with its own singers and orchestra.
Fri Nov 20 · 7:00pm
A masque first staged in London in 1696, with a libretto by Peter Anthony Motteux, telling the story of the affair between Venus and Mars and the trap her husband Vulcan lays for them. Contemporaries praised its music as having 'excelled even itself'. The Purcell Society performs it in the Cathedral Church of St Paul.
Fri Nov 20
Rebecca Roesler's first concert as permanent conductor of the UMass Boston Orchestra and director of music education is a Tolkien programme, marking twenty-five years since the first Lord of the Rings film. The orchestra uses Howard Shore's score as the starting point rather than the whole evening, building out from it.
Sat Nov 21 – Sun Nov 22 · 7:30pm/4pm
Sat Nov 21 · 7:30pm / Sun Nov 22 · 4pm
Ives's Sunrise for soprano, violin and piano opens, followed by Ravel's Chansons madécasses — settings whose subject matter was provocative enough to mark a break in his style — Kevin Puts's And Legions Will Rise for clarinet, violin and marimba, and Bartók's early Piano Quintet, Sz. 23.
Sat Nov 21 · 7:30 PM
Peter Noone — who at fifteen fronted the 1960s British Invasion band Herman's Hermits ("I'm Into Something Good," "Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter") — brings the group's hits to Needham for the Great Hall series, an evening of Sixties pop from the singer who has toured it for decades.
Sat Nov 21 – Sun Nov 22 · 8pm/2pm
Sat Nov 21 · 8pm / Sun Nov 22 · 2pm
Vancouver's contemporary ballet company makes its Vivo debut with a raw, athletic program featuring a work by artistic director Medhi Walerski — choreography that asks questions most dance doesn't dare pose. One of three international company debuts on Vivo's dance season, and Ballet BC's first Boston appearance.
Sat Nov 21 · 3:00pm
Flamenco dancers Triana Maciel and Nino de los Reyes perform a new programme, PerpetuARTE, some of it in silence, some with live musicians and some against technology — the contrast being the point. De los Reyes comes from a flamenco family and has worked across the form's traditional and experimental wings. Vivo presents it in Roxbury.
Sat Nov 21 · 5pm
Café Gherkinforke is a suite of 15 new pieces, each three and a half minutes long, written by composers worldwide for saxophone and string quartets in a dozen countries, in styles from classical and film music to jazz fusion, experimental and dance-hall. This is its Boston-area premiere, played by the Jade Quartet, a saxophone quartet that won the 2025 Boston University Chamber Music Competition.
Sat Nov 21 · 4:00pm
Recorder player Héloïse Degrugillier, cellist Guy Fishman and harpsichordist Ian Watson, performing together as New England Baroque, give a concert of English Baroque music as part of the church's Saturdays at 4 series. Fishman is principal cellist of the Handel and Haydn Society, Boston's period-instrument orchestra and chorus.
Sat Nov 21 – Sun Nov 22 · 8:00pm/3:00pm
Sat Nov 21 · 8:00pm / Sun Nov 22 · 3:00pm
BalletX, the Philadelphia contemporary ballet company of 16 dancers, gives the Boston premieres of three works: Jamar Roberts's Honey, Noelle Kayser's Scales on the Wings of a Butterfly and Marguerite Donlon's Big Wig. The New York Times has called its dancers “among America's best.” Roberts, a former Alvin Ailey dancer, was the Ailey company's first resident choreographer.
Sat Nov 21 · 7:30pm
Max Holman conducts a francophone programme from Pierre de Manchicourt's Renaissance motets to Rameau's grand motet In convertendo, by way of Fauré, Poulenc, Lili Boulanger's Les sirènes, Mel Bonis, Saint-Saëns, Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye, Couperin and Campra's Requiem. The soloists are soprano Mara Riley, tenor Corey Dalton Hart, bass Daniel Fridley and mezzo-soprano Krista River, who won a Grammy for BMOP's recording of Fantastic Mr. Fox.
$25–$60
Sun Nov 22 · 1:30pm
A French Baroque keyboard programme: a Louis Couperin suite, a suite and prélude by Rameau, selections from François Couperin's L'Art de toucher le clavecin, and Royer's storming La Marche des Scythes. Jean Rondeau, among the most celebrated harpsichordists at work today, plays.
Sun Nov 22 · 3:00pm
Rob Kapilow takes apart Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, written weeks before the composer's death, then performs it whole after the interval, with the A Far Cry chamber orchestra and clarinettist Romie de Guise-Langlois playing the illustrations. The first half is demonstration and discussion; the concerto follows entire.
Sun Nov 22 · 3:00pm
A chamber programme tracing American folk music and art song across 250 years, sung by members of the choir as soloists rather than as a full chorus. Allison Voth directs the series, which the group stages in smaller rooms than its main concerts.
Sun Nov 22 · 3:00pm
The Boston premiere of Andrew Yee's Trans Requiem, scored for trans voices, chorus and string orchestra, given on the weekend of Trans Day of Remembrance. Yee is a two-time Grammy winner, and the work is framed around the resilience of trans lives rather than only their loss.
Sun Nov 22 · 3:00pm
Schubert's Unfinished Symphony before Bruckner's Fifth, pairing one of the shortest symphonies in the repertory with one that runs well over an hour and closes on a combined chorale and fugue. The Guide to the Music precedes it. Second of four in the orchestra's final season.
Sun Nov 22 · 8:00pm
The Gunther Schuller Society joins NEC students and alumni to celebrate Schuller in an annual concert. Schuller, who died in 2015, was a horn player, composer and conductor; he coined the term Third Stream for music joining jazz and classical practice, served as the Conservatory's president from 1967 to 1977, and won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Of Reminiscences and Reflections.
Sun Nov 22 · 3:00pm
Mozart’s String Quintet No. 3 in C major, K. 515, and Brahms’s String Quintet No. 2 in G major, Op. 111, each with two violas. Violinists Peter Zazofsky, first violin of the Muir String Quartet, and Lucia Lin of the Boston Symphony join violists Wenting Kang, principal of Madrid’s Teatro Real orchestra, and Cara Pogossian, principal of the Portland Symphony, with the society’s artistic director Ronald Lowry on cello.
Individual concert $25 (season subscription $75); students admitted free
Sun Nov 22 · 3pm
The Tufts Chamber Orchestra gives its fall concert under John Page, who also conducts the Tufts Symphony Orchestra, in the music department's Sunday Concert Series. The afternoon falls in the Granoff Music Center's 20th-anniversary season, which the department is marking this fall with a run of anniversary concerts and colloquia. Admission is free, with no tickets required.
Sun Nov 22 · 3:00pm
Kevin Leong conducts Pro Arte and the Masterworks Chorale in Mozart’s Mass No. 15 in C major, K. 317, the Coronation Mass, alongside music by the brothers Joseph and Michael Haydn. The solo quartet is soprano Deborah Selig, mezzo-soprano Roselin Osser, tenor Gregory Zavracky and baritone Will Prapestis. Mozart wrote the Mass in Salzburg in 1779, when Michael Haydn was his colleague at the archbishop’s court.
Sun Nov 22 · 3pm
The Brandeis-Wellesley Orchestra, which brings together student musicians from Brandeis University and Wellesley College, gives its fall concert under Professor Neal Hampton. The afternoon runs about 90 minutes, and an RSVP through Eventbrite is optional but preferred.
Mon Nov 23 · 7:30pm
Kenneth Radnofsky leads the NEC Saxophone Ensemble in works composed and arranged for saxophones. Adolphe Sax patented the instrument in 1846, and much of what saxophone ensembles play is arranged from music first written for other forces. Radnofsky, who teaches saxophone at NEC, founded the World-Wide Concurrent Premieres and Commissioning Fund, through which saxophonists around the world premiere a new work at the same time.
Mon Nov 23 · 7:00pm
The UMass Lowell Percussion Ensemble's fall concert includes the world premiere of Derek Latta's Clown Rag, with Severino Marques as xylophone soloist, and a Suite for Solo Drum Set and Percussion Ensemble featuring Avery Stout on drums. Also on the programme are Morten Lauridsen's O Magnum Mysterium and John Beck's Jazz Variants, a long-standing piece in the percussion ensemble repertoire, among other works. Admission is free.
Tue Nov 24 · 7:30pm
Pianist and vocal coach Ji Yung Lee builds a programme on artisthood and motherhood: Helen Grime’s Bright Travellers and Thomas Kotcheff’s Both, and more with soprano Sydney Pexton, Bacewicz’s Violin Sonata No. 4, and Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben with mezzo-soprano Sarah Heltzel. A video presents The Joy of Being a Mother, a song made by mothers in Maya, Kenya, for Mtree’s Every Mother Has a Song project.
Tue Nov 24 · 7:00pm
UMass Lowell's percussion ensemble for non-percussionists, made up of musicians whose main instrument lies elsewhere, plays a programme that includes Serenade to a Sand Dune, Buckets Ruckus and Avant-Garde Contingent, along with September, a piece that uses the whole of the concert hall as its performing space. Further works fill out the concert, which is free and open to the public.
Fri Nov 27 – Thu Dec 31
Mikko Nissinen's production of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, Clara's Christmas Eve journey to the Kingdom of the Sweets, with hand-painted sets and more than 350 costumes by Robert Perdziola. The Boston Ballet Orchestra plays under Mischa Santora, and 83 students from the Boston Ballet School join the company on stage.
Fri Nov 27 – Sat Nov 28 · 1:30pm/8pm
Fri Nov 27 · 1:30pm / Sat Nov 28 · 8pm
Jean-Yves Thibaudet plays Gershwin's Piano Concerto, the composer's jazz and concert-hall sides in one work, after Ravel's Pavane for a Dead Princess. Kazuki Yamada, in his Symphony Hall debut with the orchestra, closes with two of Respighi's colourful Roman tone poems.
Fri Nov 27 – Sun Nov 29
Fri Nov 27 · 7:30pm / Sat Nov 28 · 3pm / Sun Nov 29 · 3pm
The Society's 173rd consecutive Messiah, led by its conductor laureate Harry Christophers, with the soprano Hilary Cronin and the countertenor Christopher Lowrey, played on period instruments as the orchestra always plays it. The Boston Globe called the annual performance "a holiday ritual as essential as trimming the tree."
Sat Nov 28 – Sun Nov 29 · 8pm/3pm
Sat Nov 28 · 8pm / Sun Nov 29 · 3pm
John Frederick Lampe's burlesque sets the Pyramus and Thisbe scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream, with material borrowed from Purcell's Fairy Queen. Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs are the musical directors, Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière stages and choreographs it, and Robert Mealy leads the band.
Sat Nov 28
The Dirk Hillyer Festival Orchestra, a 35-piece professional ensemble led by its conductor Dirk Hillyer, plays what is billed as Beverly’s first Holiday Pops concert: seasonal favourites, audience sing-alongs and a visit from Santa. The soloists Nathan Seavey and Bethany Vahn join the orchestra for several of the holiday numbers. The theatre recommends it for all ages.
Sat Nov 28 – Sun Nov 29
Sat Nov 28 · 2pm, Dolan Performing Arts Center (Ipswich); 7:30pm, Manchester Essex Regional High School (Manchester-By-The-Sea) / Sun Nov 29 · 2pm, Manchester Essex Regional High School (Manchester-By-The-Sea)
Yoichi Udagawa conducts the orchestra and the Cape Ann Symphony Chorus, led by Brittany Betts, who succeeded her mother Wendy Betts after sixteen seasons as its director. The programme runs from Leroy Anderson's Christmas Festival and Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker selections to Custer's Chanukah Festival, Holcomb's Festive Sounds of Hannukah and Rutter's What Sweeter Music, and ends with an audience sing-along. Christmas on Broadway is played in Ipswich only.
Sun Nov 29 · 7:00pm
A programme of immigrant composers marking the United States' 250th year: Korngold, whose melodies became the sound of classic Hollywood; Kinan Azmeh's Jisareen, written for his grandparents' hometown in Syria; Tania León's Elegía por Paul Robeson; Piazzolla's Le Grand Tango; and music by Stravinsky, Dohnányi and Irving Berlin.
Sun Nov 29 · 5:00pm
Heinrich Christensen, King's Chapel's music director since 2000, plays organ music from his native Denmark, from Buxtehude, organist at Helsingør before he settled in Lübeck, through to Carl Nielsen. Christensen trained at the Århus Conservatory and with Olivier Latry at the Conservatoire de Saint-Maur, and won prizes at the organ competitions in Odense and Erfurt. He plays the chapel's C.B. Fisk organ, Opus 44.
Sun Nov 29 · 3:00pm
The Bester Duo, Amanda and Michael Bester, has played flute and nylon-string guitar together since 2019, pairing 20th-century repertoire with original compositions. Amanda Bester directed high school choral and a cappella programmes in Chelmsford and Marblehead and works as a musical theatre director and pit musician. Michael Bester, who studied jazz guitar at the University of Miami’s Frost School, sits on the Boston Classical Guitar Society’s board.
Sun Nov 29 · 2pm
Ilana Zaks plays a solo programme drawn from folk and dance traditions: Bach’s Partita No. 3 in E major, Zhou Long’s settings of eight Chinese folk songs, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s Oshta (Four) and movements from Wynton Marsalis’s Fiddle Dance Suite. Zaks, a graduate of New England Conservatory and the Yale School of Music who studied with Itzhak Perlman, teaches at Boston University Tanglewood Institute and Rollins College.
Tue Dec 1 · 8pm
The Tufts Early Music Ensemble, directed by Jane Hershey, plays music by Jacques Arcadelt, Philippe Verdelot, Orlande de Lassus and Luca Marenzio, all sixteenth-century madrigal composers, for Renaissance consort. The title comes from Petrarch's madrigal Nova angeletta, and the department describes the programme as “musical reflections on fate, fortune, morality, and the power of nature and love.”
Tue Dec 1 · 7pm
The Willow Flute Ensemble, a Massachusetts flute choir, plays the whole flute family, from the high piccolo to the resonant bass flute, blended into a single sound. Its December programme, Sparkling Flutes: Sounds of the Season, mixes classical, traditional and contemporary music with seasonal and winter-inspired pieces. The concert is sponsored by the Friends of the Wellesley Free Libraries, and registration is required.
Wed Dec 2 · 12:10pm
Evan Ziporyn, the clarinettist and composer who is Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT and faculty director of MIT CAST, gives this half-hour midday concert in the chapel series. A founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, he layered live clarinet, bass clarinet, wind synth, effects boxes and loop pedals in an earlier chapel concert, More Sonic Holograms.
Wed Dec 2 · 7:00pm
Grand Kyiv Ballet, a touring Ukrainian company, brings Nutcracker: Symphony of Lights, a new staging of Tchaikovsky's ballet in which glowing costumes and immersive lighting design carry the familiar Christmas story. The production's page describes it as a reimagining through “light, movement, and sound” and gives no choreographer or cast; children under 15 must be accompanied by an adult.
Wed Dec 2 · 7:30pm
The Vienna Boys Choir brings Christmas in Vienna, a programme of Austrian folk songs, classical pieces, popular songs and holiday favourites. The choir traces its history to the Habsburg court chapel of 1498 and is made up of four touring choirs drawn from dozens of countries, which together give more than 300 concerts a year. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram wrote that there is “no more polished ensemble of children's voices.”
Wed Dec 2 – Thu Dec 3 · 6pm
Wed Dec 2 / Thu Dec 3 · 6pm
NEC’s first-year opera students pair Handel arias with Shakespeare monologues in a single evening, moving between Baroque opera and spoken verse. Admission is free, and a live stream is open to members of the NEC community.
Thu Dec 3 – Thu Dec 24
Holiday Pops, the Boston Pops's December mainstay and its most beloved annual tradition: a multisensory seasonal show built on sing-along classics like "Jingle Bells," "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and "Sleigh Ride," given across three weeks of evening and matinee performances.
Thu Dec 3 · 7:30pm
The first of NEC's three chamber-music galas of the year, held in December, April and May, in which student ensembles perform the works they have studied this term. Piano trios, string quartets and other groups play in sequence across the evening; the students are coached by NEC's chamber-music faculty, who also perform in the series' other concerts.
Thu Dec 3 · 8pm
Wolfi to Weill pairs opera, operetta and musical-theatre scenes by Mozart and Kurt Weill, sung by current Tufts students and invited alumni. Twenty years ago the Tufts Opera Ensemble staged a Kurt Weill revue, and this programme returns to Weill to mark the 20th anniversary of the Granoff Music Center. Carol Mastrodomenico and Thomas Stumpf direct the ensemble.
Fri Dec 4 · 7:30pm
Peter Phillips brings the Tallis Scholars back for their thirty-eighth consecutive season at this festival, with Renaissance settings written in honour of the Virgin Mary by Josquin, Tallis, Lassus, Praetorius and Schütz. The group has spent five decades making Renaissance sacred polyphony a standard concert repertoire.
Dec 4/6 · 7:30pm/3pm
Fri Dec 4 · 7:30pm, First Church in Cambridge / Sun Dec 6 · 3pm, All Saints Parish (Brookline)
Cecilia shares the stage with one of the Boston City Singers children's choruses for seasonal music written for children and adults alike, including Michael Praetorius, whose settings of Lutheran hymn tunes have been sung at Christmas for four centuries. Two performances, in Cambridge and Brookline.
Fri Dec 4 · 7:30pm
Erica J. Washburn, the conservatory's Director of Choral Activities, and Honghao Zheng direct the Symphonic Choir and Chamber Singers in a programme marking fifty years since Britten's death in 1976. Britten wrote a great deal for amateur and student forces, which makes a conservatory choir a natural fit for the anniversary.
Fri Dec 4 · 7:30pm
An all-Barber evening: the Cello Sonata Op. 6 played by Thomas Barth and Sergey Schepkin, the Piano Sonata Op. 26 played by Yi-Zhe Wu, and the Hermit Songs — settings of marginalia by Irish monks — sung by baritone Darren Chase with Schepkin.
Fri Dec 4 – Sun Dec 6
Fri Dec 4 · 7:30pm / Sat Dec 5 · 7:30pm / Sun Dec 6 · 2pm
BSU Dance's annual winter concert, billed as a celebration of "life, art, and dance," brings together choreography by faculty members, guest artists and the department's advanced students. WinterDance is one of two student-based concerts the Department of Dance stages each year, alongside a residency performance with professional artists.
Fri Dec 4 · 12pm
“Opening New Doors,” the third of this fall's New at Noon lunchtime concerts, brings the Hinge Ensemble, a Boston new-music group, to Tufts to workshop new works by Tufts composers. The series opened with saxophonist Philipp Stäudlin and pianist Yoko Hagino in “Hammers and Reeds,” and continued with John McDonald on piano and Will Cooper on organ in Goddard Chapel. Admission is free.
Sat Dec 5 – Sun Dec 6
Sat Dec 5 · 7pm, Central Congregational Church (Newburyport) / Sun Dec 6 · 3:30pm, Gordon Chapel at Old South Church (Boston); 6:30pm, Gordon Chapel at Old South Church (Boston)
Christmas in the English-speaking world from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to early America — mostly art music transcribed from old manuscripts and prints, but plain in manner and with a strong folk vein. The programme opens with the thirteenth-century Edi be thu hevene quene, and revives a Camerata holiday staple after two generations.
Sat Dec 5
A sixty-minute, sensory-friendly version of Holiday Pops for families with children or adults on the autism spectrum: reduced volume and lighting, relaxed house rules, a designated quiet room, noise-reducing headphones and credentialed autism-therapist volunteers on hand. The Boston Pops plays.
Sat Dec 5 – Sun Dec 20
José Mateo's staging of The Nutcracker, set to Tchaikovsky's score and choreographed by the company's founder in 1988, brings Clara's dream world to life with festive sets and sumptuous costumes. More than a hundred children, ages six to eighteen, dance each year alongside professional guest artists.
Sat Dec 5
Saint-Saëns's grand opera Samson et Dalila, screened live in HD from the Met: mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina and tenor Clay Hilley in the title roles of the biblical tale of seduction and vengeance, in Darko Tresnjak's epic staging. Giacomo Sagripanti conducts, transmitted from the Met stage.
Sat Dec 5 · 2:00pm
Guy Fishman, L'Armonia Boston's artistic director and principal cellist of the Handel and Haydn Society, plays cello concertos by Vivaldi and Boccherini, the music on a cassette his first teacher gave him that drew him to the cello and to baroque music. Boccherini was nicknamed "the Devil" for his own cello playing. Renée Hemsing and Susanna Ogata are the violin soloists, joined by players from NEC's Pratt Early Music Program.
$60 ($15 student)
Sat Dec 5 – Sun Dec 6 · 4pm
Sat Dec 5 · 4pm, Church of the Covenant (Boston) / Sun Dec 6 · 4pm, First Unitarian Church (Worcester)
Musicians of the Old Post Road and the early-music choir Convivium Musicum pair two country-church traditions on both sides of the Atlantic: the fuguing tunes of early American singing, and the West Gallery style of rural English parishes, along with early arrangements of familiar seasonal tunes and instrumental works. As a close to the 250th anniversary of American independence, the programme includes music by some of the region's earliest composers.
Sat Dec 5 · 2:30pm
The Merrimack Valley Philharmonic's annual Christmas concert is built on film music, including scores from Home Alone, Frozen, Elf, The Polar Express and The Grinch. Guest conductor Neal Hampton leads the 75-piece orchestra with soprano Kristen Watson and the Merrimack College Concert Choir, directed by Hugh Hinton. The programme includes an audience sing-along, and the afternoon doubles as a fundraiser with holiday basket raffles.
Sat Dec 5 – Sun Dec 6 · 7:30pm/3pm
Sat Dec 5 · 7:30pm / Sun Dec 6 · 3pm
Regie Gibson, the first Poet Laureate of Massachusetts, returns to narrate Howard Blake's The Snowman, the orchestral telling of Raymond Briggs's story about a little boy who builds a snowman that comes to life. Soprano Teresa Winner Blume and the Lexington High School Choruses join the orchestra for other holiday favourites, with Santa Claus as a special guest. A separate, shorter Kids Pops! performance is also scheduled.
Sat Dec 5 · 2:00pm
The Wellesley Symphony Orchestra's holiday concert pairs seasonal favourites by Tchaikovsky and Leroy Anderson with the orchestra's traditional audience sing-along. Music director Mark Latham, a violinist and conductor trained at the Guildhall School and the University of Michigan, succeeded Max Hobart in Wellesley and also leads the New Hampshire Philharmonic and the University Orchestra at UMass Lowell.
Sat Dec 5 · 8:00pm
Jotaro Nakano conducts the Introduction from Massenet’s Cendrillon, Berlioz’s song cycle Les Nuits d’été with soprano Corrine Byrne, Margaret Brouwer’s Path at Sunrise, Masses of Flowers and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2. Byrne, a Grammy-nominated singer with Lorelei Ensemble who teaches at Harvard and Longy, sings early music as well as new. The concert benefits Children’s Dyslexia Centers.
Sat Dec 5 · 1pm
Daniel Parsley conducts Boston University’s chorus and orchestra in four works that take up belonging, memory, faith and conviction. David Lang’s National Anthems reflects on collective identity and Brahms’s Begräbnisgesang, Op. 13, on communal remembrance; Margaret Bonds’s Credo sets the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs turns to personal faith. The concert is part of the BU Choral Orchestral Series.
Sat Dec 5 – Sun Dec 6 · 4:00pm
Sat Dec 5 · 4:00pm, St. Paul's Church (Brookline) / Sun Dec 6 · 4:00pm, West Parish Church (Andover)
Mistral Music's holiday concert is a program of Baroque concertos in which the ensemble's soloists take turns in the spotlight. Mistral, which marks its 30th anniversary this season, is directed by its founder, the flutist Julie Scolnik, author of the memoir Paris Blue.
$35 general admission (no senior or student rate)
Sat Dec 5 · 7:00pm
Mark Olson, the Metropolitan Wind Symphony's assistant conductor, leads its holiday pops concert. Olson directs the Harvard Band and Wind Ensemble, which has commissioned and premiered works by Libby Larsen, Tania León and David Amram, as well as the Middlesex Concert Band and the New England Brass Band. He is also a trumpeter, playing in MetWinds and The Tarnished Brass, and was a member of the New Sousa Band.
Adult $20; child (under 15) free
Sun Dec 6 – Thu Dec 24
A Holiday Pops kids' matinee, geared to the youngest audiences: a shorter, hour-long program with no intermission, followed by a chance to meet Santa and treats afterward. The Boston Pops plays, across a run of December matinees alongside the main Holiday Pops season.
Sun Dec 6 · 3:00pm
An afternoon of music by living American composers, pitched at families and first-time concertgoers. The programme carries several Boston premieres, the winner of the orchestra's Young Artist Competition, Call for Scores winner Aaron Levin, and the Indiana Concerto by Louis W. Ballard and Brent Michael Davids, both Native American composers. It forms part of the Philharmonic's fiftieth-anniversary season.
Sun Dec 6 · 2pm
Pianist Shai Wosner, called “a Schubertian of unfaltering authority and character” by Gramophone, builds his first half from impromptus by Schubert, Chopin, Dvořák and Gershwin, threaded with movements from Ives's Three Improvisations and a short improvised transition of his own. After intermission he plays Schubert's last piano sonata, the B-flat major, D. 960. Professor Suzannah Clark gives the pre-concert talk.
Sun Dec 6 · 2:00pm
Guitarist John Muratore, who teaches at Boston University and Dartmouth College and coordinates the guitar program at the All Newton Music School, plays a free recital for the Boston Classical Guitar Society’s Needham Library series. He has worked with composers including Daniel Pinkham and Scott Wheeler on new guitar music, and the Boston Globe has called him “a fleet-fingered and musicianly performer.”
Sun Dec 6 · 2pm
The Willow Flute Ensemble plays the full flute family, from piccolo to bass flute, in a programme of classical favourites, familiar tunes, dances, music from around the world and seasonal selections. The Massachusetts flute choir, whose four sizes of flute blend into a single sound, plays European and American classical repertoire old and new, and has appeared at Boston Conservatory and the Arlington and Brookline Porchfests.
Sun Dec 6 · 4:00pm
The UMass Lowell University Orchestra, about 60 players strong, pairs Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony with a concerto grosso by Corelli in which string players from the orchestra step forward as soloists. Tchaikovsky's symphony of 1888 carries a single motto theme from its sombre E minor opening to a major-key finale, with prominent solos for horn, woodwinds and brass along the way. Admission is free.
Mon Dec 7 · 4:00pm
Students from the Marimba in Mixed Chamber Music Ensemble and the Marimba Transcriptions and Repertoire Lab play compositions and arrangements for marimba and vibraphone, running from contemporary classical writing into jazz and pop. Nancy Zeltsman directs. There are two performances on the day, at 4pm and 7:30pm.
Mon Dec 7 – Tue Dec 8 · 7:30pm
Mon Dec 7 / Tue Dec 8 · 7:30pm
The Vienna Boys Choir brings Austrian folk songs, Christmas hymns and carols alongside classical repertoire. The institution is six centuries old and sends out several touring choirs at a time; this one sings on two consecutive evenings, both beginning at 7:30.
Mon Dec 7 · 7:30pm
A programme built around Lionel Tertis and Pablo Casals — the violist and the cellist who each did most to establish their instrument as a solo voice — in the conservatory's chamber series, which for more than forty years has put faculty, distinguished alumni, exceptional students and guest artists on the same programme.
Mon Dec 7 · 7:00pm
Four of Pro Arte's brass players give this holiday concert in the orchestra's Salon Series, the chamber strand in which a handful of musicians from its cooperative present music outside the full Ensemble Series. Principal horn Robert Marlatt, principal trumpet Dana Russian, trumpeter Joseph Foley and trombonist Hans Bohn play, in an informal format with time to talk with the musicians and hear about the music.
Wed Dec 9 · 1:00pm
Classical works for piano four hands share the concert with chamber music for piano and strings, in a selection that spans centuries, “from Bach to the modern age.” A second concert under the same title follows in May. Admission is free.
Wed Dec 9 · 7:30pm
Clayton Stephenson, a Concert Artist at the conservatory, is the soloist in Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto, with Shostakovich and Stravinsky completing the programme. Hugh Wolff conducts the Philharmonia. The Third Concerto, finished in 1921, is the most played of Prokofiev's five.
Wed Dec 9 · 6:30pm
Bridgewater State’s Social Justice Choir of Southeastern New England takes its repertoire off campus into the town’s public library, a month after its two-day festival with singers from UMass Dartmouth and the wider community. The choir performs music that carries a message of social justice, including work by underrepresented composers, and joins non-musical efforts that benefit the communities it serves. Admission is free.
Thu Dec 10 · 7:00pm
The Handel and Haydn Society performs Messiah in a reduced scoring for chamber orchestra and chorus, led by its associate conductor Ian Watson. It is a different account from the full-scale performances the period-instrument orchestra gives at Symphony Hall in late November.
Thu Dec 10 · 8:00pm
Bridgewater State's percussion ensemble performs West African drumming repertory in the Horace Mann Auditorium. The department's own description runs to a single line and names no pieces, no guest artists and no director. It is one of a sequence of department ensemble concerts running through the end of the autumn semester.
Thu Dec 10 · 7:30pm
Zero Summer moves through the waiting of Advent into the darkness of the winter solstice, the “zero summer” of T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, and the first light that follows. The hour-long programme threads contemporary works and traditional hymn arrangements with medieval chant, and includes two world premieres: Kareem Roustom’s arrangement of the Syriac Advent prayer A Glorious Light, and Elena Ruehr’s longest night. Beth Willer conducts.
Thu Dec 10 – Sun Dec 13
Thu Dec 10 · 7:30pm / Fri Dec 11 · 7:30pm / Sat Dec 12 · 2pm & 7:30pm / Sun Dec 13 · 2pm
Groton Hill's resident Vista Philharmonic Orchestra brings back Christmas Magic, a programme of holiday favourites with special guests joining the orchestra. Groton Hill pitches it as a family outing, one to make part of a holiday tradition. The run has five performances, three in the evening and matinées on Saturday and Sunday.
Fri Dec 11 · 8:00pm
Beethoven's last two piano sonatas, Op. 110 and Op. 111, heard in conversation with Bach's B-major Prelude and Fugue, Unsuk Chin's Six Études and études by Hélène de Montgeroult, the eighteenth-century composer her biographer calls "the missing link between Mozart and Chopin." Jeremy Denk plays.
Fri Dec 11 · 7:00pm
Talmi Entertainment's touring Nutcracker! Magical Christmas Ballet, now on its 33rd annual tour, sets Tchaikovsky's score with new choreography that mixes classical ballet with puppetry and acrobatics. The company fields a corps of 40 Vaganova-trained dancers alongside 10-foot puppets and nine hand-painted backdrops, and its “Dance with Us” program auditions local children to perform in roles created for them. The production is pitched at families.
From $66
Fri Dec 11 · 7:30pm
Endicott College’s Repertory Dance Ensemble, the college’s student dance company, performs original works by adjunct faculty and guest choreographers in its fall concert.
Fri Dec 11 · 8:00pm
Flutist Claire Chase joins NEC’s New Music Ensemble. Chase founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012 and teaches at Harvard, and each year she premieres new flute works for Density 2036, a commissioning cycle that runs to 2036, the centenary of Varèse’s solo Density 21.5.
Fri Dec 11
The Nightingale Vocal Ensemble performs ’Twas the Nightingale Before Christmas, billed as “a choral retelling of the beloved holiday story,” its title a play on the opening line of Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas. The St. Ignatius Concert Series brings parishioners and invited performers into the church’s worship space; admission is free, with a suggested donation.
Fri Dec 11 – Sat Dec 12
A candlelit Christmas programme built around the hymn Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming, the German carol best known in Michael Praetorius's 1609 harmonisation. Skylark, the Grammy-nominated vocal ensemble directed by Matthew Guard, sets it among medieval carols, Renaissance motets and modern reflections, on a tour that runs from New York and Washington to Sandwich, Wellesley and Newburyport.
Fri Dec 11 – Sat Dec 12 · 8:00pm
Fri Dec 11 / Sat Dec 12 · 8:00pm
Subject:Matter, a Boston tap dance company that performs with its own jazz septet, pairs With Far Hand, its second record and a concert dance work of the same name, with the world premiere of Outside, its forthcoming third album, which takes tap into soft shoe and sand dancing. Since forming in 2015 the group has made tap concerts, recordings and community events.
Sat Dec 12 · 3:00pm
Jorge Santiago Arce, a musician, dancer and cultural historian of the African roots of Puerto Rican tradition, performs Puerto Rican and Latin American folk songs arranged for strings and percussion, joined by young players from Boston Music Project, City Strings United and Project STEP in Stringfest's side-by-side format.
Sat Dec 12 · 7:30pm
Bach's Magnificat anchors the evening — he wrote it for his first Christmas as Leipzig's music director, in 1723 — alongside other seasonal pieces and a section the audience is invited to sing with the choir. Noah Horn conducts. St Paul's Parish in Harvard Square is the room.
Sat Dec 12 – Sun Dec 13 · 7:30pm/3pm
Sat Dec 12 · 7:30pm / Sun Dec 13 · 3pm
Boston Baroque gave the city's first complete period-instrument Messiah in 1981, and its Grammy-nominated reading has been a holiday fixture since. Christoph Koncz conducts this year's two Jordan Hall performances, with soloists Liv Redpath, Sun-Ly Pierce, Eric Ferring and Benjamin Appl singing Handel's oratorio of hope.
Sat Dec 12 – Sun Dec 20
Tony Williams's Boston reworking of the Nutcracker sets its winter scenes in the present-day downtown and runs Duke Ellington's Billy Strayhorn-arranged Nutcracker Suite against Tchaikovsky's score. Classical ballet anchors it, with tap, hip hop, flamenco and jazz worked through the divertissements. It has played the city every December for more than two decades.
From $29
Sat Dec 12 · 7:00pm
Every ensemble in the Bridgewater State music department — wind, choral and percussion — comes together for a holiday programme that closes the autumn semester. The department has posted the date and that description and no repertoire. It is the last of the department's concerts before the winter break.
Sat Dec 12 · 1:00pm
The abridged English-language Magic Flute that opened the Met's cinema series in December 2006, returned to theatres for the holidays. Julie Taymor's puppet-filled staging of Mozart's fairy tale features Matthew Polenzani as Tamino, Nathan Gunn as the bird-catcher Papageno and René Pape as Sarastro. A recorded performance of about two hours, suited to families and first-time opera-goers.
Sat Dec 12 · 1pm
The Tufts University Wind Ensemble, directed by Ray Daniels, gives a concert programmed for children and families, one of two family concerts on the music department's fall calendar alongside the Not-So-Small Jazz Ensemble's in November. The same band plays the Granoff Music Center's 20th-anniversary concert in October. Admission is free, with no tickets required.
Sat Dec 12 · 7pm
The Tufts Symphony Orchestra gives its fall concert under John Page, who also conducts the Tufts Chamber Orchestra, whose own fall concert comes three weeks earlier in the Sunday Concert Series. The evening falls in the Granoff Music Center's 20th-anniversary season, which the music department is marking with a run of anniversary concerts. Admission is free, with no tickets required.
Sat Dec 12 · 4:00pm
Chorus pro Musica's annual holiday concert draws on music from around the world by composers of diverse backgrounds, built around the ways different cultures mark light, warmth and togetherness in winter, with familiar classics alongside lesser-known pieces. The chorus, founded in 1949, is led by music director Jamie Kirsch, who is also Director of Choral Activities at Tufts University.
Sat Dec 12 · 7:30pm
Mary Beekman, in her final season as Musica Sacra's artistic director, gathers her favorite holiday choral works from 47 seasons with the chorus. It is the second of four concerts in her farewell season, which closes in May with Swan Song, a programme of choral favorites from her 48-year career with the ensemble.
$20–$50
Sun Dec 13 · 4:00pm
Sébastien Daucé directs Ensemble Correspondances in Charpentier's Messe de minuit pour Noël, H. 9, a Christmas Eve mass whose movements are built on traditional French carols. The festival describes it as a work where liturgical and popular traditions meet in the same music, candid but emotionally deep.
Sun Dec 13 · 2:00pm
John Muratore plays a free recital in the Boston Classical Guitar Society’s Hingham Sunday Sounds series. He has appeared as concerto soloist with the Vermont Symphony and Ridgefield Symphony and as a chamber player with Emmanuel Music and Boston Musica Viva. His solo album Shadow Box was called “a fine recording, with serious intent” by Britain’s Classical Guitar magazine, and he teaches at Boston University and Dartmouth.
Sun Dec 13 · 4:00pm
Steven Lipsitt conducts the Bach, Beethoven, & Brahms Society Orchestra in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, the one with the high trumpet part, alongside seasonal choral music from three guest choirs: the Apollo Club, Heritage Chorale and VOICES Boston. It is the season’s one concert away from United Parish in Brookline, where the orchestra gives its other Sunday programmes. The society lists no concerto soloists.
Sun Dec 13 · 3pm
The Tufts Flute Ensemble, directed by Nina Barwell, marks the Granoff Music Center's 20th anniversary with a programme of music from the 17th to the 21st century, scored across the flute family: bass flute, alto flute, C flute and piccolo. It closes the fall run of the music department's Sunday Concert Series, and admission is free, with no tickets required.
Dec 13/15 · 5pm/7pm
Sun Dec 13 · 5pm / Tue Dec 15 · 7pm
The Harvard University Choir sings the 117th Annual Christmas Carol Service, which the Memorial Church describes as America’s oldest carol service. Admission is free, with no tickets issued; doors open an hour before each service. The Sunday afternoon service is broadcast live on WHRB 95.3 FM and the Tuesday evening service streamed on the church’s YouTube channel, with a collection afterwards for the Memorial Church Grants Committee.
Mon Dec 14 · 7:30pm
The conservatory's annual holiday concert, with the Chamber Singers, the Symphonic Winds and Navy Band Northeast: popular seasonal tunes, a singalong, and an explicit invitation to turn up in a seasonal sweater and a Santa hat. Navy Band Northeast is the US Navy's regional band, based in Newport.
Tue Dec 15 · 7:30pm
Graduate conducting students of Stefan Asbury take the podium in front of an orchestra of their fellow students. NEC's own page for this date would not load during the sweep, so the date here comes from the season listing alone.
Wed Dec 16 · 8:00pm
Student ensembles coached in the Borromeo String Quartet's chamber-music seminar perform Dvořák, part of the December, April and May run in which NEC fills the season with piano trios, string quartets and other groups. The Borromeo, NEC's quartet-in-residence since the early 1990s, are Nicholas Kitchen and Kristopher Tong, violins, Melissa Reardon, viola, and Yeesun Kim, cello.
Dec 17/20 · 7:30pm/2pm
Thu Dec 17 · 7:30pm / Sun Dec 20 · 2pm
Jonathan Cohen conducts the period-instrument orchestra and chorus in Schütz's Christmas Story, a setting of the nativity narrative written more than a century before Handel's Messiah, together with the motet Hodie Christus natus est. Four performances across the week before Christmas.
Fri Dec 18 – Sat Dec 19
Fri Dec 18 · 8pm / Sat Dec 19 · 3pm & 8pm
Fifteenth-century English music for Christmas: plainchant and carols, antiphons, and polyphonic settings of the Mass, full of the graceful melody, exuberant cross-rhythm and dazzling polyphony of the period. A dozen voices of Blue Heron, the Cambridge Renaissance choir, sing under founder and artistic director Scott Metcalfe.
$10–$96; under 18 free
Fri Dec 18 – Sat Dec 19 · 7pm
Fri Dec 18 / Sat Dec 19 · 7pm
Longy's fall production is Cavalli's Il Giasone of 1649, a tragicomic opera loosely drawn from the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece, and among the most performed operas of the seventeenth century. Cavalli was Monteverdi's pupil and later his successor at St Mark's in Venice.
Fri Dec 18 – Sat Dec 19 · 7:30pm/4pm
Fri Dec 18 · 7:30pm / Sat Dec 19 · 4pm
Stephen Cleobury began commissioning a new carol each year at King's College, Cambridge in 1983; the Back Bay Chorale started its own carol competition in 2025. This programme includes commissions from King's alongside the world premiere of the 2026 Back Bay Chorale carol. Two performances.
Fri Dec 18 – Sun Dec 20
Fri Dec 18 / Sat Dec 19 / Sun Dec 20
The Firebird Pops Orchestra plays Christmas programmes across three days inside Hammond Castle, the Gloucester house John Hays Hammond Jr. built on the water in the 1920s and filled with a pipe organ of his own design. The museum has announced the dates and says ticketing and programme details are still to come.
Fri Dec 18 · 7:00pm
An hour of choral music for Christmas at the Church of the Redeemer, part of a concert series the church runs through its own calendar. No programme, no list of composers and no performer credits have been posted for the 2026-27 season — the entry gives the date, the hour and the title, and nothing else.
Fri Dec 18 – Sun Dec 20
Fri Dec 18 · 8pm, NEC's Jordan Hall (Boston) / Sat Dec 19 · 3pm, NEC's Jordan Hall (Boston) / Sun Dec 20 · 2pm, Groton Hill Music Center; 7:30pm, Groton Hill Music Center
The Boston Gay Men's Chorus brings its holiday show in two halves, with matinée and evening performances. The first is choral, built on sacred carols and seasonal music; the second turns to pop anthems, diva numbers and holiday classics reimagined “with sparkle and attitude.” Music director Reuben M. Reynolds III leads the 200-voice chorus, founded in 1982. Every performance is ASL interpreted.
Fri Dec 18 · 12:30pm
Members of the Lincoln-Sudbury Civic Orchestra break into conductorless groups, from duos to twelve players, for the Chamber Players, a chamber-music initiative new this season. The orchestra, founded in 1973 so Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School students could play alongside seasoned adults, now draws adult and student players from across MetroWest. The Lincoln Council on Aging and Human Services co-presents the concert with the library.
Sat Dec 19 – Sun Dec 20 · 3pm
Sat Dec 19 · 3pm, St. John's JP (Jamaica Plain) / Sun Dec 20 · 3pm, First Church Cambridge
A Far Cry pairs Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048, and No. 6 in B-flat major, BWV 1051, with Antoine Dauvergne’s Concert de Simphonies No. 4 in A major, Op. 4/2, and Corelli’s Concerto Grosso in G minor, Op. 6, No. 8, known as the “Christmas Concerto.” Jae Cosmos Lee curated the programme, and the concert includes a reception.
Sat Dec 19 · 4:00pm
Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors, the Christmas opera written for NBC television in 1951 and the first opera composed for the medium, paired with Bach's Epiphany cantata Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen. Emmanuel programmes the two together under the heading Empathy.
Sat Dec 19 · 11:00am
Saint-Saëns's biblical spectacle in Darko Tresnjak's outsized production, shown at the Shalin Liu two weeks after the Met's December 5 transmission. Mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina is the Philistine seductress and tenor Clay Hilley the hero whose strength she undoes; Quinn Kelsey sings the High Priest of Dagon. Giacomo Sagripanti conducts the full Met orchestra and chorus.
$30, $27
Sat Dec 19 – Sun Dec 20
Sat Dec 19 / Sun Dec 20
Seraphim's French Christmas programme follows the Seine through seasonal music from France and the French diaspora, built around Léo Delibes's Messe brève for treble voices and organ and Poulenc's Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël. Eric Christopher Perry conducts, with Heinrich Christensen at the organ, and the evening includes a carol sing. The concert is given three times over the weekend and can also be streamed.
Sat Dec 19 · 3:00pm
Max Holman conducts a programme of German Advent and Christmas choral music, with Heinrich Christensen at the keyboard: selections from Mendelssohn's Sechs Sprüche, Op. 79, Reger's Es kommt ein Schiff geladen and O Jesulein süß, Eccard's Maria wallt zum Heiligtum, Kaminski's Maria durch ein Dornwald ging, Humperdinck's Weihnachten and Tom Vignieri's Hodie Christus Natus Est, plus works for organ and brass and carols with the audience.
Red $60 | Blue $40 | Gold $25
Sat Dec 19 – Sun Dec 20
Kaaya Vritti’s ensemble performs an original dance-theatre work inspired by the River Ganga and the stories, memories and meanings gathered around her, combining Indian classical and contemporary movement with music, narration and theatrical storytelling. At its centre are promises made before their true cost is understood, and what it means to carry them through. The piece assumes no prior knowledge of the mythology or the dance traditions.
Patron / Preferred / General tiers (amounts not printed)
Mon Dec 21 · 5:00pm
Christmas music from Renaissance Iberia and the Hispanic settlements of the New World, where encounters among indigenous Americans, Spaniards and West Africans produced unusual vocal colours and rhythms. Winds, Iberian harp and percussion carry it, and the Camerata's singers are joined by Pan-American choral voices.
Sat Dec 26 – Mon Dec 28
Sat Dec 26 · 7pm / Sun Dec 27 · 1:30pm / Mon Dec 28 · 1:30pm
The touring company presents an evening of classical Chinese dance with an orchestra of Chinese and Western instruments and projected backdrops, built around stories and figures the producers draw from five thousand years of Chinese culture. Shen Yun was founded in New York in 2006 and tours several troupes simultaneously.
From $95
Sun Dec 27 – Mon Dec 28 · 2pm
Sun Dec 27 / Mon Dec 28 · 2pm
Disney's The Muppet Christmas Carol shown in full while the Boston Pops plays the score live — Kermit as Bob Cratchit and Michael Caine as Scrooge, with Gonzo narrating as Dickens through the visits of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future.
Thu Dec 31 – Fri Jan 1 · 7:30pm/3pm
Thu Dec 31 · 7:30pm / Fri Jan 1 · 3pm
Boston Baroque's annual New Year's concerts, Marc Minkowski's first as music director, open the worldwide bicentennial of Beethoven's death with an all-Beethoven program at Sanders Theatre. Minkowski's debut at last year's edition ended with an ABBA encore that brought the hall to its feet.
Thu Dec 31 · 7pm
The Needham Concert Society's New Year's Eve showcase reprises its First Night concert, in which students share the stage with the society's professional guests in highlights from the chamber music and chamber orchestra repertoire. Founded in 1976 by former Boston Symphony principal trombone William Gibson, the society marks its fiftieth anniversary under artistic director Ronald Lowry, principal cellist of the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra.
Sun Jan 3 · 3:00pm
The Lydian String Quartet, Brandeis University’s resident quartet, continues its Beethoven cycle with two quartets: Op. 18, No. 5 in A major, the early work modelled on Mozart, and the second Razumovsky, Op. 59, No. 2 in E minor. Between them sits Lera Auerbach’s Quartet No. 10, Frozen Dreams, written for a joint commission of works inspired by the four seasons.
Wed Jan 6 · 12:15pm
Carson Cooman, the Memorial Church’s composer in residence and a research associate in music at Harvard, gives a free lunchtime organ recital. Cooman is a prolific American composer of choral, organ and instrumental music, and as an organist he specialises in the performance of contemporary repertoire.
Jan 7–9/12
Thu Jan 7 · 7:30pm / Fri Jan 8 · 1:30pm / Sat Jan 9 · 8pm / Tue Jan 12 · 7:30pm
The first of four programmes traversing Tchaikovsky's complete symphonies pairs the earliest with the last: the First, Winter Daydreams, written at twenty-six, and the Sixth, the Pathétique, whose premiere he conducted days before his death and which fades to silence rather than a climax. Andris Nelsons conducts.
Fri Jan 8 · 7:30pm
Kristo Kondakçi conducts the Kendall Square Orchestra in Missy Mazzoli's These Worlds In Us, Haydn's Cello Concerto in C with soloist Leland Ko — of whom the Boston Classical Review wrote, "he imbued the finale with fire" — and Brahms's Symphony No. 1.
$15–$50
Fri Jan 8 · 8:00pm
Mozart's String Quartet No. 17 in B-flat, K.458, nicknamed the “Hunt” for its horn-call opening and one of the six he dedicated to Haydn, precedes the G minor String Quintet, K.516, of 1787, which adds a second viola. BSO violinists Bracha Malkin and Tatiana Dimitriades play with violists Rebecca Gitter and Danny Kim, also of the BSO, and cellist Jonathan Miller.
Sat Jan 9 – Sun Jan 10 · 3pm
Sat Jan 9 · 3pm, St. John's JP (Jamaica Plain) / Sun Jan 10 · 3pm, First Church Cambridge
The latest Coming to Boston programme turns to Haiti: Werner Jaegerhuber's folk-drawn Plainte nocturne, Robert Durand's First Quartet, Daniel Bernard Roumain's Quartet No. 1 'X,' after Malcolm X, and music by Jean 'Rudy' Perrault, alongside the poet and storyteller Charlot Lucien. A Far Cry plays.
Sat Jan 9 – Sun Jan 10 · 7pm/3:30pm
Sat Jan 9 · 7pm, Friends Meeting House (Cambridge) / Sun Jan 10 · 3:30pm, Follen Church (Lexington)
Sarasa's coffee-house programme is built around Nicolas Bernier's cantata Le Caffé for soprano, flute, strings and continuo, with an aria by the eighteenth-century soprano and composer Gertrud Elisabeth Mara, a trio sonata by Janitsch, a W.F. Bach duet for two flutes and Telemann's Concerto in E minor for recorder and flute. Mara Riley sings, with Ashley Solomon, flute, Christoph Wald, recorder, and John McKean, organ.
$26 advance / $30 door ($10 under-35 & students)
Sun Jan 10 · 3:00pm
Wolf's Italian Serenade, a quartet miniature built on an old Italian tune, opens; Mendelssohn's D minor Piano Trio, Op. 49 follows; and Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence closes, a string sextet whose slow movement he wrote during a stay in Italy.
Sun Jan 10 · 3:00pm
The programme is all Mozart: the G minor String Quintet, K.516, completed in 1787 and scored with two violas, and the B-flat Quartet, K.458, known as the “Hunt” and one of six quartets Mozart dedicated to Haydn. Bracha Malkin, a Wieniawski and Paganini competition prizewinner, and Tatiana Dimitriades play violins; Rebecca Gitter and Danny Kim play viola, and artistic director Jonathan Miller cello.
Sun Jan 10 · 3pm
Evan Ziporyn’s Blackstar, which recasts David Bowie’s final album as a cello concerto for Maya Beiser, was first heard in 2017. This version, Aura: Blackstar Visualized, adds an immersive video projection by Alex Rigopulos, co-creator of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, and the studio Secret Portal, with Beiser playing alongside the 20-plus musicians of Ambient Orchestra. Ziporyn and Beiser were founding members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars.
Tue Jan 12 · 7:30pm
Pianist Stephen Drury, known for the range of his repertory and as a champion of contemporary music, plays a programme NEC describes only as diverse works. Drury, who teaches piano at the Conservatory, founded its Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice and the new-music group the Callithumpian Consort, and is closely associated with the music of John Cage and John Zorn.
Jan 13/17 · 7:30pm/3:00pm
Wed Jan 13 · 7:30pm / Sun Jan 17 · 3:00pm
The first of two faculty recitals this season by pianist Pei-Shan Lee, who has taught collaborative piano at NEC since 2009 and directs the Collaborative Piano Fellowship at the Bowdoin International Music Festival. In 2006 she was appointed pianist for Itzhak Perlman’s violin studio at the Perlman Music Program, and she has recorded the Strauss and Szymanowski sonatas with violinist Grzegorz Kotow.
Jan 14–16/19
Thu Jan 14 · 7:30pm / Fri Jan 15 · 1:30pm / Sat Jan 16 · 8pm / Tue Jan 19 · 7:30pm
The cycle continues with the least-played of the set, the Third, five movements nicknamed the Polish for the dance rhythms of its finale, set against the Fourth, the first symphony Tchaikovsky built around a recurring fate fanfare that returns to block every impulse toward happiness. Andris Nelsons conducts.
Thu Jan 14 · 8:00pm
All three of Beethoven's Op. 30 violin sonatas, Nos. 6, 7 and 8, the set that opens his "heroic" middle period, written in 1802 alongside the Heiligenstadt Testament, played without an interval. Violinist Gil Shaham and pianist Akira Eguchi, partners of two decades, play.
Fri Jan 15 · 7:30pm
Mezzo-soprano MaryAnn McCormick, of NEC’s voice faculty, gives a recital. Over more than twenty-five seasons at the Metropolitan Opera she sang 140 performances, and she shares the 2012 Grammy for Best Opera Recording as Grimgerde in the Met’s Die Walküre. Her roles elsewhere include Isabella in L’italiana in Algeri at La Scala and the title role of Carmen in Rome.
Sat Jan 16 · 8:00pm
Mozart's Symphony No. 32 — a single continuous movement in three sections, closer to an Italian overture than a symphony — opens, followed by Elgar's Cello Concerto, written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War, and Sibelius's Second Symphony.
Sat Jan 16 · 8:00 PM
Cellist Leland Ko, violinist Clara Neubauer and pianist Adria Ye join as a piano trio for a concert in the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts series at Jordan Hall.
Sun Jan 17 · 4:00pm
Violinist Masha Lakisova and pianist Yali Levy Schwartz play Brahms's Sonata No. 2 in A major, Prokofiev's Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Beethoven's Sonata No. 10 in G major and a Nocturne by Lili Boulanger. Lakisova, a master's student of Miriam Fried at New England Conservatory, won the World's Biggest Stage Competition and NEC's Brahms Concerto Competition; Levy Schwartz has performed in New York, Tel Aviv and Tbilisi.
Sun Jan 17 · 2:00pm
Kim Perlak, Chair of Guitar at Berklee College of Music since 2018, plays a free recital for the Boston Classical Guitar Society. Her performances of classical works, original pieces and collaborations with jazz and traditional players have been featured on NPR, and her project with veterans, “Ben & I Play for Peace,” was honoured by PBS’s From the Top. She wrote Classical Technique for the Modern Guitarist.
Sun Jan 17 · 3:00pm
Randy Steere plays a programme of seldom-heard and new organ music on the hall's Hauptwerk virtual pipe organ, which samples historic instruments such as the Görlitz Sonnenorgel. Works by Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, Saint-Saëns, Jongen, Lanquetuit and living composers Adam Heron and Daniel Gawthrop sit around Bach's Fantasy and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542. Steere was assistant organist at Old South Church and is dean of the Worcester AGO chapter.
Sun Jan 17 · 3:00pm
Conductor emerita Gisèle Ben-Dor leads a family concert of music and storytelling. Revueltas's Sensemayá depicts an Afro-Caribbean ceremony in which a ritualist subdues a snake; the finale of Brahms's Double Concerto, written to repair his friendship with Joseph Joachim, features young soloists including cellist Sofia Hernandez-Williams; Jonathan Bailey Holland's El Jaleo follows John Singer Sargent's flamenco painting; and Carey Goldberg narrates Ferdinand the Bull to Bizet's Carmen suites.
Wed Jan 20 · 7:30pm
Each year the Borromeo String Quartet, in residence at NEC since the early 1990s, auditions the Conservatory's students for its Guest Artist Awards, spending a week in which every entrant plays and works with the quartet. This concert features the winners. The Borromeo are Nicholas Kitchen and Kristopher Tong, violins, Melissa Reardon, viola, and Yeesun Kim, cello.
Thu Jan 21 – Sat Jan 23
Thu Jan 21 · 7:30pm / Fri Jan 22 · 1:30pm / Sat Jan 23 · 8pm
The Second, long known as the Little Russian for the Ukrainian folk tunes woven through it, and the Fifth, which like the Fourth turns on a recurring motto theme, carrying it from darkness to a major-key close. Andris Nelsons conducts this instalment of the symphony cycle.
Fri Jan 22
Pianist Marie-Elise Boyer plays Romantic repertory by Chopin and Florence Price, the Arkansas-born composer whose manuscripts were found in an abandoned house in 2009 and whose music has been widely programmed since. The St Ignatius series has published the two composers' names and no further programme detail.
Sat Jan 23
Puccini's Gold Rush opera, which had its premiere at the Met in 1910, follows Minnie, who runs a saloon in a California mining camp and stakes the life of the bandit she loves on a poker game with the sheriff. This live HD transmission shows Richard Jones's new staging, with Vida Miknevičiūtė making her Met debut as Minnie opposite SeokJong Baek and Christopher Maltman; Keri-Lynn Wilson conducts.
Sat Jan 23 · 6:00pm
The first instalment of a new series built around the food, drink and social world that surrounded seventeenth-century English music, led by theatre historian Robert Lublin with chef Jason Wang. Purcell and the Pub recreates the tavern culture in which much of this repertoire was actually heard, with the audience seated around the table rather than facing a platform.
Sat Jan 23 · 1:00pm
Puccini's Gold Rush opera in the Met's first new production of it in over thirty years, staged by Richard Jones and transmitted live to the Shalin Liu. Vida Miknevičiūtė makes her company debut as Minnie, the saloon keeper who gambles for a bandit's life; SeokJong Baek is Dick Johnson and Christopher Maltman the sheriff Jack Rance. Keri-Lynn Wilson conducts.
$30, $27
Sun Jan 24 · 5:00pm
The King's Chapel Choir, the chapel's 17-voice professional ensemble, sings settings of the same texts by different composers, sometimes written centuries apart, in a programme that asks “Who wrote it best?” Heinrich Christensen, the Danish-born organist who has been King's Chapel's music director since 2000, conducts. Children aged 8 to 17 are admitted free.
Sun Jan 24 · 2:00pm
Selected composers hear their orchestral scores rehearsed by a full symphony orchestra and then take feedback from composer-in-residence Carlos Carrillo, guest mentors and the players themselves. The readings are open to the public, so the audience watches new pieces being worked on rather than performed. The Philharmonic runs them annually; this one falls in its fiftieth season.
Sun Jan 24 · 3:00pm
Mezzo-soprano Fanny Lora, whose recitals centre on classical Spanish and Latin American repertoire, shares the afternoon with guitarist and accompanist Dave McLellan, who has performed since 1976 in halls including Carnegie Hall and London's Wigmore Hall and toured Britain twice in the 1980s with the Anderson-McLellan Duo. Lora trained at Ithaca College and teaches in the Boston Conservatory at Berklee's Alexander Technique program. Admission is free.
Sun Jan 24 · 3:00pm
The Ringers, a Boston brass ensemble founded and directed by horn player Jack Krugman, frame a world premiere by Gaston Gosselin with three works for brass: Michael Tilson Thomas's Street Song, a Brass Quintet by Victor Ewald, the Russian civil engineer and amateur cellist, and the Brass Quintet of the English composer William Lovelock. Krugman studied horn at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
Sun Jan 24 · 3:00pm
The Boston Symphony Chamber Players, an ensemble of the orchestra's principal musicians, play Tchaikovsky's Souvenir of Florence, the string sextet he wrote in 1890 after a stay in Florence spent composing his opera The Queen of Spades. Liadov's Eight Russian Folk Songs, heard in a version for wind quintet, and Sofia Gubaidulina's Garden of Joy and Sorrow, for flute, viola and harp, complete the programme.
Series of 4 Sunday afternoons: $120-$204
Wed Jan 27 · 7:30pm
Hugh Wolff, NEC's Director of Orchestras, conducts the Philharmonia in Clarice Assad's Boitatá, named for the fire serpent of Brazilian folklore, Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for piano and orchestra, and Schumann's Symphony No. 3, the Rhenish, written in 1850 in the composer's first months in Düsseldorf. Assad, a Brazilian-American composer and pianist, is the daughter of the guitarist Sérgio Assad.
Thu Jan 28 · 7:30pm
A Boston debut built on Liszt's transcriptions of Schubert Lieder, "Der Wanderer," "Auf dem Wasser zu singen" and "Frühlingsglaube" among them, set beside Schubert's own "Wanderer" Fantasy, D. 760, and Liszt's second book of Années de pèlerinage. The Austrian pianist Lukas Sternath plays.
Fri Jan 29 – Sat Jan 30 · 7:30pm
Fri Jan 29 / Sat Jan 30 · 7:30pm
Damien Geter's Baroque-inspired cantata Kiss and Tell, to a libretto by Tsitsi Jaji, receives its first performance, co-commissioned with the Cleveland early-music ensemble Les Délices and drawing on myths from several cultures. Jonathan Cohen conducts, with the countertenor Reginald Mobley; Handel's cantata Vedendo amor shares the programme.
Jan 29/31 · 7:30pm/4pm
Fri Jan 29 · 7:30pm, St Elizabeth's Church (Sudbury) / Sun Jan 31 · 4pm, First Lutheran Church (Boston)
Choral and organ music by Hans Leo Hassler, the leading organ composer in southern Germany around 1600, who began his career in Venice and was brought to Augsburg by the Fugger family. Organ works and choral pieces alternate, on the instruments of St. Elizabeth's in Sudbury and First Lutheran Church in Boston. Tenor Jason McStoots directs the singers, with Andrus Madsen at the organ.
Jan 29/31 · 7:30pm/2pm
Fri Jan 29 · 7:30pm / Sun Jan 31 · 2pm
Tchaikovsky wrote The Queen of Spades in six weeks in 1890, to a libretto his brother Modest drew from Pushkin's novella about a gambler who tries to extract a card secret from an old countess. Kristine Opolais sings Lisa and David Butt Philip the obsessive Hermann; Andris Nelsons conducts this semi-staged production, closing the orchestra's Tchaikovsky cycle. Presented with Boston Lyric Opera.
Sun Jan 31 · 4:00pm
Warren Senders, a Hindustani vocalist on NEC’s Music Education faculty whose work spans Indian, Western, African and African-American traditions, gives a faculty recital. Also trained as a jazz bassist, he founded the pan-cultural ensemble Antigravity in 1981, is a core member of Boston’s Jazz Composers’ Alliance and serves as a creativity consultant for Babson College’s MBA program.
Sun Jan 31 · 6:00pm
Boston Dance Theater performs Unfurling, a site-responsive piece made with visual artist Kim Radochia that combines movement, sound and sculptural installation. It draws on "the quiet resilience of plant life" and on the writings of the Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, with dancers moving through the space "like tendrils of growth." Company members stay for a short talkback afterwards.
Sun Jan 31 · 3:00pm
Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E-flat major, Op. 70, No. 2, paired with Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 3 in F minor, Op. 65. Pianist Randall Hodgkinson, an artist member of the Boston Chamber Music Society who teaches at NEC, Wellesley and Longy, joins Romanian violinist Irina Muresanu of the University of Maryland faculty and cellist Ronald Lowry, the society’s artistic director and principal cellist of the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra.
Sun Jan 31 · 3pm
Recorder player Aldo Abreu joins Duo Maresienne, Carol Lewis on viola da gamba and Olav Chris Henriksen on theorbo and Baroque guitar, in music by Matteis, Finger, Paisible, Corelli and others. Matteis, Finger and Paisible were foreign-born musicians who made their careers in late-17th-century London, the city where paying public concerts first took hold, and Corelli's sonatas were widely played there.
Tue Feb 2 · 7:30pm
Haydn's F-minor Variations, Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19, Mozart's A-minor Rondo, K. 511, a two-minute Kurtág written in 2022 and Schubert's late A-major Sonata, D. 959, to close. Mitsuko Uchida gives her first Boston solo recital in a generation.
Thu Feb 4 – Sat Feb 6
Thu Feb 4 · 7:30pm / Fri Feb 5 · 1:30pm / Sat Feb 6 · 8pm
Alisa Weilerstein, the orchestra's artist in residence, plays Prokofiev's Sinfonia Concertante, the cello work he revised for Rostropovich near the end of his life, before Sibelius's Second Symphony of 1902. Paavo Järvi conducts, in his Symphony Hall debut with the BSO.
Thu Feb 4 · 7:30pm
Kevin Fitzgerald, NEC's Director of Wind Ensembles, leads the Symphonic Winds, one of the Conservatory's two large wind groups alongside the Wind Ensemble, in its winter concert. Fitzgerald joined NEC this year; his October debut with the Symphonic Winds paired Karel Husa's Cheetah, Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, David Liptak's Through the Brightening Air and Grainger's Lincolnshire Posy.
Thu Feb 4 – Sun Feb 7
Thu Feb 4 · 7:30pm / Fri Feb 5 · 7:30pm / Sat Feb 6 · 1pm & 7:30pm / Sun Feb 7 · 1pm
The Conservatory's commercial dance majors work across jazz, hip-hop, musical theatre and circus, dancing world premieres by guest artists Alex Fetbroth, Asiel Hardison and Reina Hidalgo and by faculty members Jun Kuribayashi and Lindsey Klein. The programme also carries a reconstruction of Bob Fosse's Dancin' Man, which puts a piece of Broadway's choreographic record on a student stage.
Fri Feb 5 · 7:00pm
Palaver Strings is a musician-led ensemble from Portland, Maine, where the players share the artistic and administrative leadership between them. This programme features Liz Knowles, and the group's stated aims run to engaging new audiences, addressing social justice and amplifying underrepresented voices.
Sat Feb 6 · 3:00pm
Johannes Regis's Missa Ecce ancilla Domini, written for the Annunciation, set beside all four of Okeghem's Marian motets — two Franco-Flemish contemporaries, one far less heard than the other, in a single programme. Blue Heron sings, directed by Scott Metcalfe.
$10–$96; under 18 free
Sat Feb 6 · 3:00pm
A participatory sing-in on Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, commissioned in 1965 by Walter Hussey for Chichester Cathedral and setting Hebrew texts. Anyone may join the singers or listen from the pews. Free, with registration, and singers bring their own score. The Chorale has built a run of these participatory evenings, on the Fauré and Mozart requiems in past seasons.
Sat Feb 6 · 2:00pm
Elisa Citterio, the Italian baroque violinist and former leader of Toronto's Tafelmusik, makes her Boston-area debut directing L'Armonia Boston in a programme she curated from across 17th- and 18th-century Europe: music written to depict particular passions in sound and to stir them in the listener. Players from New England Conservatory's Pratt Early Music Program join the ensemble.
$60 ($15 student)
Sat Feb 6 · 7:30pm
John Adams's The Chairman Dances, the foxtrot he drew from his opera Nixon in China, opens a programme built around music crossing cultures. Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, written first for piano duet on French fairy tales, follows, and the evening closes with a Symphony No. 1 by a composer the orchestra lists only as Zhao. The concert continues the orchestra's collaboration with the Chinese American Association of Lexington.
Sat Feb 6 · 3:00pm
Fred Springer, a classical guitarist who also arranges and transcribes for the instrument, plays a free community recital for the Boston Classical Guitar Society. He has won prizes in international solo and ensemble competitions and performed in the United States, Argentina, Switzerland and Canada. He studied at the University of Texas at Austin, minoring in art history, and took a master's at Columbus State University's Schwob School of Music.
Sat Feb 6 · 7:30pm
The Vista Philharmonic's programme on growth and identity sets Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Weber and Brahms's Symphony No. 2 around Kris Bowers's For a Younger Self, a violin concerto that follows a "Hero's Journey" within the traditional form. Grammy winner Charles Yang, a Juilliard alumnus like Bowers, who scored the films Green Book and King Richard, is the soloist.
Sun Feb 7 · 3:00pm
Britten's Three Divertimenti and Mendelssohn's grief-stricken F-minor Quartet, Op. 80, written in 1847 in the wake of his sister Fanny's death, precede Brahms's Piano Quintet, Op. 34, in which the Isidore String Quartet is joined by pianist Jeremy Denk for a work that makes equal demands of piano and strings.
Sun Feb 7
The Boston Pops welcomes the Lunar New Year with a program honoring traditions across Asia, joined by Anda Union, a band of Mongolian singers and instrumentalists who draw on a range of traditional Mongolian musical styles. Norman Huynh conducts the Boston Pops.
Sun Feb 7 · 3:00pm
A Musicians Unleashed chamber concert of music by women composers, among them Beach, Coleman, Franc and Hoover. It is the second of three concerts in the series during the Cape Ann Symphony's 75th season, between an October string programme and an April brass concert. Yoichi Udagawa, the orchestra's music director, conducts.
Sun Feb 7 · 2:00pm
The Wellesley Symphony Orchestra plays three works about the natural world. Missy Mazzoli’s Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) is music in the shape of a solar system; Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus, his Concerto for Birds and Orchestra, sets tape recordings of birdsong against the orchestra; and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, the Pastoral, closes the programme. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, with a reception afterwards.
Sun Feb 7 · 3:00pm
Pro Arte's wind principals play light-hearted French music of the 20th century in this Salon Series programme: Ibert's Cinq Pièces en Trio for oboe, clarinet and bassoon, Claude Arrieu's Quartet for flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon, and Jean Françaix's Quintette No. 1, which adds horn. The players are flutist Ann Bobo, oboist Nancy Dimock, clarinetist Ian Greitzer, bassoonist Ronald Haroutunian and hornist Robert Marlatt.
Wed Feb 10 · 7:00pm
C Street Brass, a brass quintet founded in 2008 and now based in Pittsburgh, plays a programme spanning Baroque works, Broadway numbers and contemporary music. The group was ensemble in residence at Carnegie Mellon University from 2012 to 2015 and at Colorado’s Strings Music Festival from 2013 to 2018, and its members also formed Beauty Slap, a band pairing brass with electronic dance music.
Wed Feb 10 · 7:30pm
The NEC Symphony, the Conservatory's second full orchestra alongside the Philharmonia, gives its first concert of the spring term. The Symphony's autumn concerts were conducted by David Loebel, NEC's associate director of orchestral activities, and the violinist and violist Paul Biss. Admission is free, with a ticket.
Thu Feb 11 – Sat Feb 13
Thu Feb 11 · 7:30pm / Fri Feb 12 · 1:30pm / Sat Feb 13 · 8pm
Marking Philip Glass's ninetieth birthday, Dennis Russell Davies conducts three orchestral works whose premieres he led, among them the 1987 Violin Concerto he first persuaded Glass to write. Davies has championed the composer's music for decades, from the early ensemble pieces to the fifteen symphonies of his later career.
Thu Feb 11 – Thu Mar 18
A noontime series on Thursdays through late winter, pairing Bach's unaccompanied sonatas and partitas for violin with contemporary pieces chosen by each performer. Emmanuel presents the run as a single series rather than as separate concerts, and does not publish the individual programmes in advance.
Fri Feb 12 · 7:30pm
A Far Cry's Valentine's programme, curated by Crier Rafael Popper-Keizer: Pachelbel's Canon, the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth, George Walker's Lyric for Strings, Schoenberg's Notturno and Vasks's Lonely Angel among them, with Boston Poet Laureate Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah reading between the pieces.
Fri Feb 12 – Sat Feb 13
Fri Feb 12 · 8pm / Sat Feb 13 · 2pm & 8pm
The Limón Dance Company's first Boston visit since 2005, in its 80th-anniversary season: José Limón's bright, Chopin-set Mazurkas (1958) alongside a new Akram Khan work — his first made on an American company — inspired by Limón's The Moor's Pavane.
Fri Feb 12
A baroque choir and period ensemble perform music by Bach and Buxtehude, the Lübeck organist Bach walked some two hundred miles to hear in 1705 and stayed to study for months. The St Ignatius series has posted the two composers and the date; no specific works have been named.
Sat Feb 13 · 8:00pm
Beethoven's "Ghost" Trio, Op. 70 No. 1, opens; a new work by Andrew Norman, co-commissioned by Vivo and given here in its New England premiere, follows; and Shostakovich's wartime Second Piano Trio, Op. 67, closes. Violinist Stefan Jackiw, cellist Jay Campbell and pianist Conrad Tao are the Junction Trio.
Sat Feb 13 · 7:30pm
The King's Singers take the Romantic part-song as their subject — Lieder, chansons and partsongs from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The group has sung a cappella for more than fifty years, its six voices replaced one at a time across that span.
Sat Feb 13 – Sun Feb 14 · 4:00pm
Sat Feb 13 · 4:00pm, West Parish Church (Andover) / Sun Feb 14 · 4:00pm, St. Paul's Church (Brookline)
Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings heads a Valentine's weekend programme that also includes the Cavatina from Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 130, offered for the 200th anniversary of his death in 1827, and Amy Beach's quintet for flute and strings. The string players are violinists Sarita Kwok and Siwoo Kim, violists Danny Kim and Stephanie Fong, cellist Raman Ramakrishnan and bassist Tom van Dyck.
$35 general admission (no senior or student rate)
Sun Feb 14 · 3:00pm
Beethoven's Coriolan overture and the Ninth Symphony. The orchestra's traditional pre-concert lecture, the Guide to the Music, runs an hour and a quarter beforehand in the hall. This is the third of four Boston Philharmonic programmes in what the orchestra has announced as its closing season.
Sun Feb 14 · 4:00pm
Evren Ozel plays Beethoven's final three piano sonatas — Opp. 109, 110 and 111 — marking the anniversary of the composer's death. The last of them abandons the expected fast finale for a set of variations that thins almost to silence before it ends.
Sun Feb 14 · 3:00pm
Chorus pro Musica joins the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, in what the chorus describes as the orchestra's final season, for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, his last, composed when he was completely deaf. Its finale brings in vocal soloists and chorus for the “Ode to Joy,” a setting of Schiller's poem. The chorus's music director is Jamie Kirsch, who also directs choral activities at Tufts University.
Sun Feb 14 · 3:00pm
Stravinsky fills most of this Boston Symphony Chamber Players programme: the Septet for clarinet, bassoon, horn, piano and strings, the Duo concertante for violin and piano, Powell's arrangement of the Suite italienne for double bass and piano, and two solo works, the Three Pieces for clarinet and the Elegy for viola. Caroline Shaw's string quartet Plan and Elevation and Joan Tower's Petrushkates, a play on Stravinsky's Petrushka, round it out.
Series of 4 Sunday afternoons: $120-$204
Wed Feb 17 · 8:00pm
The new-music percussion quartet Sō Percussion joins avant-pop artist Helado Negro and indie-folk songwriter Kate Stables (This Is the Kit) for a spontaneous collision of rhythm, song and invention — one of four February nights Vivo programs at Davis Square's Crystal Ballroom, and the one anchored by a chamber ensemble.
Thu Feb 18 – Sun Feb 28
A mixed bill led by Crystal Pite's Emergence, which sets some thirty dancers swarming to Owen Belton's pulsing score, patterns forming and rupturing like a colony. Jorma Elo's Brake the Eyes, to Mozart, and William Forsythe's Herman Schmerman complete the programme.
Thu Feb 18 – Sat Feb 20
Thu Feb 18 · 7:30pm / Fri Feb 19 · 1:30pm / Sat Feb 20 · 8pm
Håkan Hardenberger is the soloist in a new trumpet concerto by Unsuk Chin, the Grawemeyer-winning Korean-German composer, before Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, whose 1913 premiere famously ended in a riot. Andris Nelsons conducts, the first of two weeks devoted to Stravinsky's early ballets.
Fri Feb 19
Ruckus makes its festival debut with German music from the dawn of the Enlightenment — Bach, Biber and Buxtehude. The band sets the early-music movement's methods against the groove of American roots playing, a combination The New Yorker described as "rough-edged intensity".
Feb 19/21 · 7:30pm/3pm
Fri Feb 19 · 7:30pm / Sun Feb 21 · 3pm
Rachel Podger returns to direct all six Brandenburg Concertos from the violin. Bach assembled the set in 1721 as a presentation copy for the Margrave of Brandenburg, scoring each for a different combination of instruments. The Boston Musical Intelligencer credited the orchestra's Bach with "a casual Baroque swagger".
Fri Feb 19 · 7:00pm
Grand Kyiv Ballet, a touring Ukrainian company, pairs two Spanish-themed scores. Carmen Suite sets Bizet's story to Rodion Shchedrin's 1967 adaptation for strings and percussion, written for his wife, the Bolshoi ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, and here presents Carmen as “passionate, free, and defiant.” The company adds the world premiere of its own Boléro, danced to Ravel's 1928 score.
Feb 20–21/26–27
Sat Feb 20 · 1:30pm & 7:30pm / Sun Feb 21 · 1:30pm / Fri Feb 26 · 7:30pm / Sat Feb 27 · 1:30pm & 7:30pm
The Sudbury Savoyards' annual Gilbert and Sullivan, this year The Pirates of Penzance, with its Pirate King, the Major-General's patter song and the leap-year birthday that traps Frederic in his apprenticeship. The volunteer company stages G&S on a grand scale, casts of sixty and an orchestra of thirty, as it has each winter since 1961.
Sat Feb 20 · 8:00pm
Beethoven's "Appassionata," Op. 57, and Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit anchor a recital that also takes in Henry Cowell's "Aeolian Harp," a Saint-Saëns Prelude and Fugue, and Brahms's F-minor Sonata, Op. 5. Zlata Chochieva returns after her 2025 Vivo debut.
Sat Feb 20 – Sun Feb 21 · 7:30pm/4pm
Sat Feb 20 · 7:30pm / Sun Feb 21 · 4pm
Turina's The Toreador's Prayer and Stravinsky's suite from L'Histoire du soldat sit alongside Behzad Ranjbaran's Fountains of Fin, which takes a sixteenth-century Iranian garden as its subject, Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Kol Nidre meditation for cello and piano, and Fauré's G minor Piano Quartet, Op. 45.
Sat Feb 20 · 7:30pm
The percussion pair arx duo, Garrett Arney and Sijia Huang, are the guest soloists in two concertos written for them: Pascal Le Boeuf's Triple Concerto, for violin, percussion duo and orchestra, and Michael Gilbertson's Concerto for Percussion Duo, which the duo co-commissioned. Music director Avlana Eisenberg conducts a programme that also includes Elgar's Serenade for Strings and de Falla's El Amor Brujo.
Sun Feb 21 · 3:00pm
Schubert's B minor Rondo for violin and piano opens, then Brahms's Horn Trio, Op. 40, written the year his mother died, and finally Schubert's C major String Quintet, D. 956, the two-cello quintet he completed in the last months of his life.
Sun Feb 21 · 5:00pm
Soloists from the King's Chapel Choir sing music by Carson Cooman, Conte, Robles and others, with Heinrich Christensen, the chapel's music director since 2000, at the organ; Christensen has premiered several of Cooman's works. The instrument is the chapel's C.B. Fisk Opus 44, the first tracker-action organ built by an American firm in the twentieth century. Concerts in the series last about an hour.
Sun Feb 21 · 2:00pm
Thatcher Harrison, a guitarist and composer, plays a programme drawn mainly from his own “classical fusion” pieces, which rest on classical technique while borrowing from jazz, rock, blues, folk, film scores and world music. He studied at New England Conservatory with Eliot Fisk and Jérôme Mouffe, took a master's at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and has played guitar societies and festivals from Austin to Pleven in Bulgaria.
Mon Feb 22 · 7:00pm
The twenty-fifth annual recital by Berklee's harpists, with a programme running from classical repertoire through contemporary and jazz writing to the players' own compositions. There is also an appearance by the guzheng, a Chinese zither distantly related to the harp and plucked with picks worn on the fingers.
Mon Feb 22 · 7:30pm
The conductorless NEC Chamber Orchestra gives its spring concert. Its players are chosen by audition at the start of the academic year and stay together throughout, rotating the leadership for every work so that each player takes responsibility for musical decisions. Donald Palma, a double bassist and founding member of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, is artistic director.
Mon Feb 22 · 7:00pm
Niloufar Nourbakhsh and her colleagues in Ensemble Decipher play instruments built from things never meant to be instruments, in a programme about transmission. Rhizome Music feeds live drums through vintage radios back into acoustic instruments, Stone Dreams makes motion-sensor stones the instrument, Marti Epstein's new work pairs toy pianos with altered cassette tape, and Erin Rogers's Telegraph passes nonsense text between players. Ensemble members Nourbakhsh, Bohigian and Cosgrove contribute works too.
Tue Feb 23 · 7:00pm
Berklee faculty perform standout student projects from the college’s counterpoint and harmony courses: the Art of Counterpoint 1 and 2, Advanced Counterpoint, and Tonal Harmony and Composition 2. Admission is free.
Tue Feb 23 · 7:30pm
Trumpeter Michael Dobrinski, who joined NEC’s faculty in 2018 and has chaired its Brass and Percussion department since 2023, gives a faculty recital. He plays regularly with the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops and appears on the BSO’s recordings of Shostakovich’s Seventh and Twelfth symphonies and Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony. He was previously principal trumpet of the Sarasota Orchestra.
Thu Feb 25 – Sat Feb 27
Thu Feb 25 · 7:30pm / Fri Feb 26 · 1:30pm / Sat Feb 27 · 8pm
Petrushka and The Firebird, the other two of Stravinsky's three early ballets for Diaghilev: Pierre Monteux led the BSO's first Petrushka in 1920, and Stravinsky himself conducted the orchestra in The Firebird in 1935. Andris Nelsons conducts, closing the two-week survey.
Thu Feb 25 · 7:30pm
Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, arranged for two guitars by the players themselves and performed on instruments a single luthier built from one tree. Thibaut Garcia and Antoine Morinière, longtime friends, pass Bach's counterpoint back and forth between them rather than dividing it in two.
Thu Feb 25 – Sat Feb 27
Thu Feb 25 · 8pm / Fri Feb 26 · 8pm / Sat Feb 27 · 2pm & 8pm
Taiwanese choreographer Huang Yi has danced with KUKA, an industrial robot arm, for over a decade; their duet turns the push and pull between humanity and technology into something startlingly tender. Presented with the Museum of Science in its new Public Science Common.
Thu Feb 25 – Sun Feb 28
Thu Feb 25 · 7:30pm / Fri Feb 26 · 7:30pm / Sat Feb 27 · 2pm / Sun Feb 28 · 2pm
Mozart and Da Ponte’s 1786 comic opera, drawn from Beaumarchais’s play, follows the servants Figaro and Susanna through their wedding day as Count Almaviva pursues the bride and the Countess mourns his lost affection. William Lumpkin conducts. It is this season’s spring opera from the Opera Institute and the School of Theatre, an annual collaboration cast with students of the College of Fine Arts.
Fri Feb 26 · 8:00pm
Ravel's La Valse, Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, played by the Youth Orchestra. This is the second of the BPYO's three programmes this season, all in Symphony Hall; the season announcement does not yet name the piano soloist.
Fri Feb 26 · 8:00pm
Dvořák's String Quartet No. 14 in A-flat, Op. 105, begun in New York and finished in 1895 after his return to Bohemia, was the last he completed. It is paired with Mendelssohn's Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13, written at eighteen and built on his own song “Ist es wahr?”. Violinists Lucia Lin and Kina Park join violist Rebecca Gitter and cellist Jonathan Miller.
Sat Feb 27 · 8:00pm
Charles Shadle's Postcards from Native America receives its New England premiere, paired with Molly Herron's Canon No. 4 for bassoon and tape and Amy Beach's F-sharp minor Piano Quintet of 1907 — the best-known chamber work of a composer who spent most of her career in Boston.
Sat Feb 27 – Sun Feb 28 · 8pm/3pm
Sat Feb 27 · 8pm, NEC's Jordan Hall (Boston) / Sun Feb 28 · 3pm, Harvard's Sanders Theatre (Cambridge)
Marc Minkowski pairs two solo Bach cantatas with Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, the setting of Mary's grief at the crucifixion that the composer finished in the final months of his life, at twenty-six. Soprano Maya Kherani and countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen are the soloists, one night each at Jordan Hall and Sanders.
Sat Feb 27 – Sun Feb 28 · 8:00pm/3:00pm
Sat Feb 27 · 8:00pm / Sun Feb 28 · 3:00pm
PHILADANCO!, The Philadelphia Dance Company, was founded in West Philadelphia in 1970 by Joan Myers Brown, and for more than five decades has trained dancers in the tradition of Black American concert dance. The company brings a new work that "honors the company's legacy while propelling it forward." The engagement is sponsored in part by LEAD3R.
Sat Feb 27 · 7:30pm
Rossini's Petite messe solennelle, written in 1863, more than three decades after his last opera, is heard in its chamber form with piano and harmonium rather than the composer's later orchestration. Max Holman conducts from the piano, with Heinrich Christensen on harmonium, and the solo quartet is soprano Carley DeFranco, mezzo-soprano Julia Cavallaro, tenor Jonas Budris and bass Junhan Choi.
Red $60 | Blue $40 | Gold $25
Sun Feb 28 · 3:00pm
Marking Philip Glass's ninetieth birthday, Ólafsson interleaves Glass's études and "Opening" from Glassworks with keyboard suites by Rameau and Children's Corner pieces and preludes by Debussy, placing Glass in a long line of French keyboard writing rather than apart from it. Víkingur Ólafsson plays.
Sun Feb 28
Music for female voices by Hildegard von Bingen and by anonymous composers of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas, one of medieval Spain's most prestigious convents. Trio Mediæval was founded in Oslo in 1997 and sings this repertoire in three parts.
Sun Feb 28 · 3:00pm
Collage New Music builds a programme out of pairs: spatialized instrumental duos, opposing gestures, and works drawn from childhood objects, online communication and social change. Blues and bluegrass run through it alongside contemporary classical writing, and student performers join. Two sextets for full ensemble close.
Sun Feb 28
Cantata Singers and music director Noah Horn perform Fauré’s Requiem, composed between 1887 and 1890, which leaves out most of the Dies irae that dominates other settings of the mass for the dead and pares back the orchestra to put the voices forward; the chorus calls the result “almost prayer-like.” The rest of the programme is unannounced, though the concert runs about an hour and 45 minutes with an intermission.
Sun Feb 28 · 3:00pm
Mendelssohn wrote his A minor Quartet, Op. 13, in 1827 at eighteen, weaving in his own song “Ist es wahr?”; Dvořák's A-flat Quartet, Op. 105, sketched in America and completed in 1895, was the last he finished. Lucia Lin, a BSO violinist and Tchaikovsky Competition prizewinner, plays with violinist Kina Park, BSO violist Rebecca Gitter and cellist Jonathan Miller, the ensemble's founder.
Sun Feb 28 · 3:00pm
Céili Connors, a Boston guitarist who performs as a soloist and chamber musician, teaches at the New England Conservatory and the Community College of Rhode Island. She took her master's in guitar performance at NEC under Eliot Fisk after a Bachelor of Music at the University of Rhode Island, and studied flamenco and Spanish guitar while living in Granada. Admission is free.
Mon Mar 1 – Wed Mar 31
A new opera by composer Joey Timmons and librettist Anna Jean Simmons, made with Voice of Iris and Horizon Ensemble. Little Songbook has announced March 2027 and an audition call for September 2026; no venue, cast or exact dates are posted yet.
Tue Mar 2 – Wed Mar 3 · 7:30pm
Tue Mar 2 / Wed Mar 3 · 7:30pm
The first of two all-Beethoven evenings with Lang Lang: he plays the First Piano Concerto, and Andris Nelsons closes with the Fifth Symphony and its four-note fate motif. Between them, Lauren Smith, a 2026 Tanglewood conducting fellow, leads the Egmont Overture as the capstone of her fellowship.
Thu Mar 4 · 7:30pm
The NEC Wind Ensemble, one of the Conservatory's two large wind groups alongside the Symphonic Winds, gives its spring concert under Kevin Fitzgerald, NEC's Director of Wind Ensembles. Fitzgerald joined the Conservatory this year and leads both groups. Admission is free, with a ticket.
Fri Mar 5 – Sat Mar 6 · 7:30pm/8pm
Fri Mar 5 · 7:30pm / Sat Mar 6 · 8pm
Lang Lang returns for Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto, an early and lyrical work, with the Fifth Symphony again closing the evening under Andris Nelsons. Julian Gilewski, another 2026 Tanglewood conducting fellow, leads the Leonore Overture No. 3 as the capstone of his fellowship.
Fri Mar 5 · 8:00pm
Baroque sonatas for violin and harpsichord, Bach's BWV 1014, 1015 and 1016 among works by Froberger, Westhoff, Matteis and Biber, tracing the violin's rising expressive power and the harpsichord's shift from accompanist to partner. Isabelle Faust and Kristian Bezuidenhout play, in association with the Boston Early Music Festival.
Fri Mar 5 · 7:00pm
Singers from Longy’s Vocal Studies Department join Orchestra I.S. for arias, duets and trios spanning cultures and eras, billed as “four centuries of voice in a single evening.” Admission is free, with registration requested in advance.
Sat Mar 6 · 4:00pm
Donald Nally, who leads The Crossing, the Philadelphia professional choir devoted to new music, and has won four Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance, guest conducts the Chorale in a programme of his most celebrated commissions, among them Michael Gilbertson’s Cloud Anthem. Music director Stephen Spinelli also conducts. It is the third concert in a season the Chorale has built around figures who commissioned new music.
Sat Mar 6 – Sun Mar 7 · 7pm/3:30pm
Sat Mar 6 · 7pm, Cambridge Friends Meeting House / Sun Mar 7 · 3:30pm, Follen Church (Lexington)
Mozart's String Quartet in B-flat, K. 458, The Hunt, and his Horn Quintet in E-flat, K. 407, frame two watery songs in Robert Percival's arrangements for tenor, horn and string quartet: Schubert's Auf dem Strom and Moscheles's rediscovered Am Bach. Tenor Charles Blandy and natural-horn player Anneke Scott join violinists Jesse Irons and Anna Griffis, violist Jason Fisher and cellist Jennifer Morsches.
$26 advance / $30 door ($10 under-35 & students)
Sat Mar 6 – Sun Mar 7 · 4pm
Sat Mar 6 · 4pm, First Parish in Wayland / Sun Mar 7 · 4pm, Old South Church (Boston)
Baroque composers from across Europe went to Rome to study the Italian expressive style, and this programme gathers music by several who did, among them Handel, G. Benda, Muffat, Bononcini and Froberger, in quartets, trios, duos and solos. Musicians of the Old Post Road is a Boston-area period-instrument ensemble whose repertoire runs from the Baroque to the early Romantic, with an emphasis on rediscovered works.
Sat Mar 6 · 8:00 PM
Pianists Alessio Bax and Lucille Chung, who are married and perform and record together as a duo for four hands and two pianos, give a joint recital. Bax, born in Italy, won first prize at the Hamamatsu competition in 1997 and at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 2000; Chung, from Montreal, made her debut with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra at the age of ten.
Sat Mar 6 · 3:00pm
Boston's Modern Connections Collective dances excerpts from four works by Jenny Oliver, the choreographer who founded the company. The pieces take moments of empowerment as their starting point and work through relationship and resilience. Vivo presents the programme at the Roxbury Community College Media Arts Center rather than downtown.
Sat Mar 6 · 3:00pm
The Providence Mandolin Orchestra plays a free community concert for the Boston Classical Guitar Society. The original orchestra was founded in 1911 by William Place Jr; today's ensemble dates from its early-1970s revival by Hibbard Perry, one of Place's students, and performs across the eastern United States and Western Europe. Mark Davis, a Perry pupil who also studied with the German guitarist Siegfried Behrend, has directed it since 1989.
Sat Mar 6 · 7:30pm
The Vista Philharmonic, Groton Hill's resident orchestra, builds a programme around Debussy's La Mer, his "symphonic sketches" of the sea. Joshua Mhoon is the guest soloist in Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor, and the evening closes with Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1, the 19-year-old's graduation piece, whose "wrong-note" humour nods to his time as a silent-film accompanist.
Sun Mar 7 · 3:00pm
Widmann's Sonatina facile, ten pieces from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, Op. 75, and Mozart's C-minor Fantasia, K. 396, before Prokofiev's Eighth Sonata, Op. 84, the last of his three wartime sonatas, ends the evening. Seong-Jin Cho returns to Symphony Hall.
Sun Mar 7 · 4:00pm
Hub New Music and the New York composer-pianist Paul Kerekes give the world premiere of a substantial quintet by Kerekes, with further pieces by Viet Cuong, Elijah Daniel Smith and Geli Li. Hub New Music is a quartet of flute, clarinet, violin and cello.
Sun Mar 7 · 2:30pm
Guest conductor David Scott leads the orchestra with singers Sandra Piques Eddy, Mara Bonde and Neal Ferreira in an afternoon of arias, duets and orchestral excerpts — the Ruslan and Lyudmila overture, the Carmen Habanera, O sole mio and the Lakmé Flower Duet among them.
Sun Mar 7 · 3:00pm
Three world premieres and two Boston premieres, by Massachusetts composers Curt Cacioppo and Stella Gitelman Willoughby, MIT senior lecturer Charles Shadle, who is Choctaw, Pulitzer-winning Diné composer Raven Chacon, and composer-in-residence Carlos Carrillo. The Philharmonic has run this survey of living composers annually for decades, making it one of the longest-standing new-music series in the city.
Sun Mar 7 · 7:30 PM
Cellist Raman Ramakrishnan and pianist Max Levinson play Debussy, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff. Both are artist members of the Boston Chamber Music Society, so the recital pairs two players who already work together regularly. Andrew Mark directs the String Masters Series, which sits inside the Conservatory's Artistry in Action programme of faculty and guest concerts.
Sun Mar 7 · 3pm
All five of Beethoven's cello sonatas in one programme, marking the bicentenary of the composer's death: the two early Op. 5 sonatas, the two late Op. 102 works, and finally the A major Sonata, Op. 69. Dutch cellist Pieter Wispelwey, praised by The New York Times for his “unusually complete grasp of the music,” plays with pianist Pei-Shan Lee. Professor Anne Shreffler gives a pre-concert talk.
Sun Mar 7 · 3:00pm
Music for clarinet and strings in Pro Arte's Salon Series: Haydn's String Quartet in C major, Op. 20, No. 2, one of his “Sun” quartets, and Brahms's Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115, written in 1891, late in his career, for the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld. Concertmaster Julia Cash, Liana Zaretsky, Jeff Pearson, principal cellist Steven Laven and clarinetist Kai-Yun Lu play.
Sun Mar 7 · 3:00pm
Florent Schmitt's Dionysiaques, which MetWinds calls “the only known example of French Impressionism written specifically for band,” opens a French programme that ends with Martin Ellerby's Paris Sketches. Between them come Debussy's The Engulfed Cathedral, Guy Woolfenden's Suite Française, Jan van der Roost's Suite Provençale and Mark Camphouse's Symphonic Prelude, a tribute to the Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer. Music director Gabe Southard conducts.
Adult $20; senior (62+) $15; student (5+) $5; under 5 free
Tue Mar 9 – Wed Mar 10 · 7:30pm
Tue Mar 9 / Wed Mar 10 · 7:30pm
Thirteenth-century Iberia at the court of Alfonso X the Wise, who called himself King of the Three Religions and drew Jewish, Christian and Muslim musicians to it. The programme is built on his collection of songs to the Virgin, with Jewish and Islamic material woven around the Christian songs.
Tue Mar 9 · 8:00 PM
Sofya Gulyak became the first woman to win the gold medal at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 2009 and has played with orchestras across Europe, Asia and the United States since. Her programme here is built on 'Liszt and his Dances'. Michael Lewin directs the Piano Masters Series at the Conservatory.
Wed Mar 10 · 7:00pm
The Ivalas Quartet pairs standard quartet repertoire with works by BIPOC composers, a programming line the Juilliard-trained ensemble has built its reputation on. The Strad praised its playing for "tremendous heart and beauty". Admission is free, with reservations encouraged. The quartet formed at the University of Michigan and takes its name from a contraction of the members' initials.
Wed Mar 10 · 7:30pm
An annual concert in NEC's Composition Department honours Arthur Berger, who joined its faculty in 1980 and stayed two decades. Berger reviewed music for the Boston Transcript and the New York Herald Tribune, founded two journals, and moved as a composer from neoclassicism to twelve-tone writing; BMOP has recorded his complete orchestral works for New World. Sid Richardson curates the programme.
Thu Mar 11 – Sun Mar 21
George Balanchine's staging of Coppélia, Delibes's comic ballet after E.T.A. Hoffmann: Swanilda grows suspicious of the lifelike doll in the toymaker Coppélius's window that has caught her fiancé's eye, and disguises herself as it to teach him a lesson. The Boston Ballet Orchestra plays the score live.
Thu Mar 11 · 7:30pm
The London Symphony Orchestra makes its first Symphony Hall appearance since 2009, under its chief conductor Sir Antonio Pappano. Maxim Vengerov is the soloist in Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Op. 61, and Strauss's Ein Heldenleben, a tone poem with a substantial solo-violin part of its own, closes the programme.
Thu Mar 11 · 7:30pm
The second of Pei-Shan Lee’s two faculty recitals this season, after one in January. Lee, who came to the United States from Taiwan and joined NEC’s collaborative piano faculty in 2009, has played with the Jupiter and Szymanowski quartets and with members of the Boston and Chicago symphonies, and is a founding member of DC8, a Los Angeles group devoted to commissioning new music.
Mar 12/14/19/21
Fri Mar 12 · 7:30pm / Sun Mar 14 · 3pm / Fri Mar 19 · 7:30pm / Sun Mar 21 · 3pm
Mozart and Da Ponte's comedy of one wedding day: Figaro and Susanna outmanoeuvring the philandering Count, the farce laid over a sharp critique of aristocratic privilege. David Angus conducts and Anne Bogart directs, with Michael Sumuel, Madison Leonard and Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, a highlight of BLO's fiftieth season.
Fri Mar 12 · 7:30pm
A solo piano recital by Sergey Schepkin running from Busoni's transcription of Bach's Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland through Haydn's E flat Sonata, Beethoven's Six Bagatelles Op. 126, Debussy's first book of Images, two Chopin nocturnes and Ravel's Sonatine. Glissando notes the programme may change.
Fri Mar 12 – Sat Mar 13
Britten's Five Flower Songs, written in 1950 for the silver wedding anniversary of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, the founders of Dartington Hall, anchor a Skylark programme of music about gardens, birdsong and the living world. The Grammy-nominated vocal ensemble, directed by Matthew Guard, takes it from Falmouth to Chestnut Hill, Newburyport and the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington.
Fri Mar 12 – Sat Mar 13 · 8:00pm
Fri Mar 12 / Sat Mar 13 · 8:00pm
Reckless Underdog, the newest creation from Victor Quijada's Montreal company RUBBERBAND, is a three-act piece for 12 dancers, each act set in a distinct universe: one drawn from classical ballet, one taking an abstract, minimal approach to movement, and one that takes apart the practice of the break cypher. Quijada founded the company in 2002 to fuse hip-hop with ballet and contemporary dance.
Sat Mar 13 · 3:00pm
Holy Week music from the Cathedral of Seville: Lamentations by the Seville-born Cristóbal de Morales and Peñalosa's Missa Nunca fue pena mayor, the dense, dark polyphony of the sixteenth-century Spanish repertory. Blue Heron sings under its artistic director, Scott Metcalfe.
$10–$96; under 18 free
Sat Mar 13 – Sun Mar 14 · 3pm
Sat Mar 13 · 3pm, St. John's JP (Jamaica Plain) / Sun Mar 14 · 3pm, First Church Cambridge
A chamber programme on greatness, built around Valerie Coleman's Shotgun Houses, a tribute to Muhammad Ali for clarinet and strings. Around it: Haydn's 'Quinten' Quartet, Op. 76 No. 2, Rebecca Clarke's Pastorale, and Golijov's Ever Yours, drawn from Van Gogh's letters to his brother. Members of A Far Cry play.
Sat Mar 13 – Sun Mar 14 · 8pm/3pm
Sat Mar 13 · 8pm / Sun Mar 14 · 3pm
Emilie Mayer's Faust Overture opens — Mayer wrote eight symphonies in nineteenth-century Berlin and went largely unplayed for a century afterwards — followed by Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Beethoven's Triple Concerto. Two performances, Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. Mayer studied with Carl Loewe and had her works played across Germany in her lifetime.
Sat Mar 13 · 7:30 PM
Seraph Brass, the touring quintet founded by trumpeter Mary Elizabeth Bowden to showcase women brass players, plays the Great Hall series. Winners of the American Prize in Chamber Music, the group ranges across Baroque transcriptions, new commissions and arrangements, and performs as a larger ensemble on tour.
Sat Mar 13 · 7:30pm
David T. Little and Royce Vavrek's opera imagines the last night John and Jacqueline Kennedy spent in Fort Worth before Dallas. Rather than staging the history, it moves through dream states — mythic Fates guide the couple into visions mixing memory and fantasy — and holds them at the edge of what is about to happen.
Sat Mar 13 · 7:30pm
Edmund Jenkins's Rhapsodic Overture, in an arrangement by T. Zimbabwe, opens the programme; the orchestra describes Jenkins as a Black jazz musician from Charleston who lived in Europe. Irina Muresanu is the soloist in Sibelius's Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47, and the evening ends with Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5, which the orchestra calls “a deeply personal musical exploration of his soul.” A conductor's talk precedes it.
Sat Mar 13 · 7:30pm
JIJI, who plays acoustic and electric guitar in programmes running from traditional and contemporary classical to free improvisation, became in 2016 the first guitarist in 30 years to win first prize at the Concert Artists Guild Competition. The Washington Post named her in 2021 among “21 composers/performers who sound like tomorrow.” Recent concerto dates include Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez with the Auckland Philharmonia.
Sat Mar 13 – Sun Mar 14 · 8pm/7:30pm
Sat Mar 13 · 8pm, Church of the Covenant (Boston) / Sun Mar 14 · 7:30pm, First Church in Cambridge
Seraphim marks the Singing Revolution of 1986–1991, when Estonians and their Baltic neighbours used mass choral singing and banned patriotic songs to protest Soviet occupation, with a programme of Estonian choral music. It centres on Arvo Pärt's Berliner Messe for choir and organ and Veljo Tormis's rarely performed Raua needmine (Curse Upon Iron), for choir and Koryak drum. Eric Christopher Perry conducts, with Heinrich Christensen at the organ.
Sat Mar 13 · 7:30pm
Holly Druckman is guest conductor for this concert by Musica Sacra, the Harvard Square choir that Mary Beekman has directed since 1979, in a season that ends with Beekman's farewell after 48 years. The choir sings repertoire spanning five centuries, both familiar and rare.
Sun Mar 14 · 4:00pm
Fauré taught both Ravel and Enescu, and this recital sets his A major Sonata, Op. 13 beside Ravel's posthumously published first sonata and Enescu's Third, written in Romanian folk style. Eleanor Alberga's The Wild Blue Yonder completes it. Nathan Meltzer and Mika Sasaki play.
Sun Mar 14 · 3:00pm
Robert Stern's Shofar finally reaches performance after its 2020 cancellation, in a programme honouring three Massachusetts musicians since lost — Stern himself, the baritone Sanford Sylvan and the conductor Donald Wilkinson. Vaughan Williams's Five Mystical Songs is paired with it.
Sun Mar 14 · 8:00pm
Violinist Ayano Ninomiya, who teaches at NEC, gives a faculty recital. As first violinist of the Ying Quartet she recorded the complete quartets of Schumann and of Arensky and the album American Anthem, and she is a founding member of the conductorless East Coast Chamber Orchestra. She made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2016 in Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto.
Sun Mar 14 · 2:00pm
Pianist Michael Lewin, whose recordings have won a Grammy and whose career began with top prizes at the Franz Liszt International Competition and the William Kapell competition, plays Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Gottschalk's Grande Tarantelle. Yoichi Udagawa conducts a programme that opens with Copland's An Outdoor Overture and closes with Grofé's five-movement Grand Canyon Suite, from “Sunrise” to “Cloudburst”.
Sun Mar 14 · 3:00pm
Kim Perlak, chair of guitar at Berklee, and Francisco Mela, the Cuban-born jazz drummer who teaches percussion there, formed this duo in 2024 to pair modern classical guitar with avant-garde drumset. They play original works alongside spontaneous composition; their debut recording, Spaces, holds three multi-movement pieces by Perlak and one spontaneously composed three-movement work, and came out on Sacred Black Records. Admission is free.
Sun Mar 14 · 3:00pm
Six players from The Ringers, the Boston brass ensemble founded by Jack Krugman, play keyboard and choral music arranged for brass. Contrapunctus V and IX from Bach's The Art of Fugue and the C major Prelude and Fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier sit beside Shostakovich's Prelude and Fugue in C, a Prelude and Fugue by Amy Beach, a Bach chorale and one of Grieg's 19 Norwegian Folk Songs.
Mon Mar 15 · 7:30pm
Kenneth Radnofsky conducts the NEC Saxophone Ensemble, the Conservatory's student saxophone group, in its spring-term concert. Radnofsky, a longtime member of the NEC faculty, founded World-Wide Concurrent Premieres and Commissioning Fund, which pools saxophonists and institutions to commission new works and premiere them in many places at once. Admission is free with a ticket.
Wed Mar 17 · 7:30pm
The NEC Symphony, the Conservatory's second full orchestra alongside the Philharmonia, gives its second concert of the spring term. David Loebel, NEC's associate director of orchestral activities, and the violinist and violist Paul Biss conducted the Symphony's autumn concerts. Admission is free, with a ticket.
Wed Mar 17 · 7:30pm
NEC’s New Music Ensemble, inaugurated in fall 2022, plays a programme of diverse works under Stefan Asbury, the British conductor who directs it. Asbury specialises in contemporary repertoire and has long taught conducting and led new-music programmes at the Tanglewood Music Center.
Thu Mar 18 · 7:30pm
Erica J. Washburn, NEC's Director of Choral Activities, conducts the NEC Chamber Singers in their spring concert. The choir, 24 to 30 students drawn from every major at the Conservatory, sings works from all style periods with an emphasis on a cappella music of the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, rehearses three times a week, and usually performs in the round.
Thu Mar 18
The Boston Pops turns to the Celtic tradition, rollicking dance tunes and heartfelt ballads in an homage to the long and storied musical history of Ireland — the orchestra's annual turn toward Irish music. Keith Lockhart conducts.
Fri Mar 19 · 8:00pm
An all-Czech programme: Pavel Haas's gathering Third Quartet, Op. 15, written as war approached; Janáček's First, after Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata; and Dvořák's "American," Op. 96, written among Czech immigrants in Iowa. The Pavel Haas Quartet, named for the composer who died at Auschwitz, plays.
Fri Mar 19 – Sat Mar 20 · 7:30pm/3pm
Fri Mar 19 · 7:30pm / Sat Mar 20 · 3pm
Jean-Marie Zeitouni conducts the Fifth Symphony two hundred years after Beethoven's death. The orchestra plays it on gut strings and valveless brass, a balance quite different from the one the modern symphony orchestra has standardised. Zeitouni conducts, and the programme is built around the symphony rather than pairing it with a concerto.
Fri Mar 19 · 7:30pm
An all-Beethoven recital of the last three piano sonatas — Op. 109, Op. 110 and Op. 111 — written between 1820 and 1822 and often played as a set. The last of them ends not with a fast finale but with a long set of variations. Leif Ove Andsnes plays.
Sat Mar 20
Kevin Puts's Pulitzer-winning Silent Night, receiving its Met premiere and a live-HD cinema transmission: the true story of the 1914 Christmas truce, when First World War soldiers crossed the trenches to sing carols with the enemy. Dalia Stasevska conducts James Robinson's staging.
Sat Mar 20 · 7:30pm
The Kendall Square Orchestra under Kristo Kondakçi plays Elena Kats-Chernin's Big Rhap, Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber — familiar Weber melodies recast for full orchestra — and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4, the composer's fate-haunted score.
$15–$50
Sat Mar 20 · 1:00pm
Kevin Puts's Pulitzer-winning opera about the 1914 Christmas truce reaches the Met for the first time, in James Robinson's staging, transmitted live to Rockport. Mark Campbell's libretto moves between English, French and German as soldiers cross the trenches to sing together. Elza van den Heever, Ben Bliss and Rolando Villazón lead the cast; Dalia Stasevska conducts in her Met debut.
$30, $27
Sat Mar 20 · 8:00pm
Jotaro Nakano conducts Missy Mazzoli’s These Worlds in Us, the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Brahms’s Symphony No. 3 in F major. Longwood is the orchestra of Boston’s medical community, and each concert benefits a partner; this one supports Care Dimensions, the state’s largest hospice provider, which also runs palliative care, home primary care and a dementia programme.
Sun Mar 21 · 3:00pm
A Bach birthday programme: four Contrapuncti from The Art of Fugue and the Trio Sonata from The Musical Offering, framed by Béla Kovács's Hommage à J.S. Bach for solo clarinet and Wuorinen's arrangements from the Glogauer Liederbuch. Schumann's E-flat Piano Quartet, Op. 47 closes.
Sun Mar 21 · 4:00pm
Bach first performed the St Matthew Passion in Leipzig in 1727, and this marks its three-hundredth anniversary. Emmanuel programmes it under the heading Humanity, the last of the themes running through its season, and describes itself as Boston's premiere Bach ensemble.
Sun Mar 21 · 3:00pm
The second of the season's chamber programmes turns to the folk and art song of Great Britain, past and present, sung by members of the choir as soloists in a smaller room than the main series uses. Allison Voth directs.
Sun Mar 21 · 3:00pm
Gonzalo Grau's Odisea, a concerto for the Venezuelan cuatro and orchestra, anchors a Spanish- and Latin American-inspired programme conducted by Francisco Noya. The soloist is Jorge Glem, a Latin Grammy winner with C4 Trío who has played cuatro concertos with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Grau is a Venezuelan-born composer and bandleader.
$11.50–$46.50
Mar 21/26 · 7:30pm
Sun Mar 21 · 7:30pm, First Lutheran Church (Boston) / Fri Mar 26 · 7:30pm, St Elizabeth's Church (Sudbury)
Violinist Susanna Ogata plays “The Mount of Olives,” “The Carrying of the Cross” and “The Crucifixion” from Biber's Mystery Sonatas, and soprano Teresa Wakim sings music for Holy Week, including Giovanni Sances's Stabat Mater and Giovanni Paolo Colonna's Lamentations of Jeremiah, with Andrus Madsen on keyboard. The second performance, in Sudbury on March 26, is given within a Good Friday service.
Sun Mar 21 · 5:00pm
A mass, a motet and a cantata mark the birthday of J.S. Bach, sung by the King's Chapel Choir with soloists and orchestra under Heinrich Christensen, the chapel's music director and organist since 2000. Christensen, trained in Denmark and at the Boston Conservatory, has recorded Bach's Clavierübung III. The concert is presented in memory of Jay R. Schochet.
Sun Mar 21 · 5:00pm
The Church of the Redeemer Choir sings Kenneth Leighton’s Crucifixus pro nobis, a 1961 cantata for tenor, chorus and organ setting 17th-century Passion poems by Patrick Carey and Phineas Fletcher, as a Palm Sunday choral meditation. Leighton, the English composer who held the Reid chair of music at the University of Edinburgh from 1970, wrote extensively for Anglican choirs. Admission is free, with a suggested donation.
Sun Mar 21 · 2:00pm
The Wellesley Symphony Orchestra’s family programme opens with music from two superhero films, Pinar Toprak’s score for Captain Marvel and Rupert Gregson-Williams’s for the 2017 Wonder Woman. At its centre is Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, the narrated tale he wrote in 1936 to introduce children to the instruments of the orchestra. The winner of the orchestra’s Michael H. Welles concerto competition also performs.
Sun Mar 21 · 2:00pm
Guitarist Catherine O'Kelly and flutist Arielle Burke have played together since 2011, when both were students at the Hartt School, and named the duo for Castelnuovo-Tedesco, whose Sonatina for Flute and Guitar was their first piece. O'Kelly chairs the guitar department at the Rivers School Conservatory and is completing a doctorate at Hartt; Burke holds a master's from the New England Conservatory.
Fri Mar 26 · 7:30pm
The Lydian String Quartet, Brandeis University’s resident quartet, brings its Beethoven cycle to the Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131, the seven-movement late work Beethoven considered his greatest in the form, preceded by Op. 18, No. 6 in B-flat major, the close of his early set. Between them comes Jörg Widmann’s String Quartet No. 4, a compact piece built from walking, step and breathing gestures.
Sat Mar 27
A shorter, interactive concert built for families and for children or adults with autism or sensory sensitivities: house lights up, volume down, room to move, a quiet space and noise-reducing headphones on hand. Thomas Wilkins conducts, working storytelling into the programme.
Mon Mar 29 · 7:30pm
The Borromeo String Quartet, ensemble-in-residence at NEC for more than three decades, is joined by Paul Wiancko, cellist of the Kronos Quartet and a composer, for a faculty recital. The Borromeo (Nicholas Kitchen, Kristopher Tong, Mai Motobuchi and Yeesun Kim) was the first string quartet to play from laptop scores on stage, and performs Kitchen's transcriptions of Bach's Goldberg Variations.
Apr 1/3–4
Thu Apr 1 · 8pm / Sat Apr 3 · 8pm / Sun Apr 4 · 2pm
Himari, in her Symphony Hall debut, plays Prokofiev's lyrical Second Violin Concerto, paired with his popular Fifth Symphony — the two works the BSO first gave in America under Serge Koussevitzky in 1937 and 1945. Andris Nelsons conducts, and takes the programme on to Carnegie Hall days later.
Fri Apr 2 · 8:00pm
The 2022 Cliburn silver medallist opens with Brahms's four Ballades, Op. 10, the first shadowing the old Scottish ballad "Edward," and closes with Beethoven's Eroica Variations, Op. 35, taking in Bartók's Scherzo, Chopin's Variations brillantes and Liszt's three Valses oubliées along the way. Anna Geniushene plays.
Apr 2/4 · 7:30pm/3pm
Fri Apr 2 · 7:30pm / Sun Apr 4 · 3pm
Nicolas Altstaedt is the soloist in Haydn's C major Cello Concerto, a work lost for a century and a half until a set of parts turned up in Prague in 1961. Jonathan Cohen directs the period-instrument orchestra from the front.
Fri Apr 2 · 7:00pm
inn.wien, a collective of young, classically trained string players from Innsbruck and Vienna founded in 2020, plays the Gessner-Schocken Concert Series, endowed through a legacy gift from Ruth Gessner-Schocken, a longtime Longy faculty member and supporter. The ensemble performs in flexible line-ups, with a repertoire running from Mendelssohn’s Octet and Schubert’s String Quintet to world premieres.
Sat Apr 3 – Sun Apr 4 · 7:30pm/4pm
Sat Apr 3 · 7:30pm / Sun Apr 4 · 4pm
Libby Larsen's Songs From Letters sets Calamity Jane's correspondence with the daughter she gave up. Schumann's Märchenbilder and Gershwin's Short Story sit alongside it, with Paquito D'Rivera's Aires Tropicales for wind quintet and Dvořák's E-flat String Quintet, Op. 97 to close.
Sat Apr 3
Massenet's passionate drama Manon, screened live in HD from the Met: soprano Nadine Sierra in the title role opposite tenor Matthew Polenzani as her idealistic lover, the Chevalier des Grieux, in Laurent Pelly's breathtaking Belle Époque production. Yves Abel conducts, transmitted from the Met stage.
Sat Apr 3 · 3:00pm
Francesco Barone, a classical guitarist who performs as a soloist and chamber musician, plays a free community recital for the Boston Classical Guitar Society. He was a prizewinner in the Philadelphia Classical Guitar Society competition, has appeared with the Connecticut and New England guitar societies and at the Hartt School Guitar Festival, and holds a DMA from Hartt, where he studied with Richard Provost. He teaches at Saint Anselm College.
Sat Apr 3 · 7:30pm
The Vista Philharmonic's programme of symphonic favourites opens with Rossini's William Tell Overture and Smetana's The Moldau, then "Spring" from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons with concertmaster Alice Hallstrom as soloist. The second half is a "Symphony of Symphonies" assembled by Bruce Hangen from movements of Beethoven's Fifth, Tchaikovsky's Fourth, Dvořák's "New World" and Shostakovich's Fifth, with other favourites promised besides.
Sat Apr 3 – Sun Apr 4 · 8:00pm/3:00pm
Sat Apr 3 · 8:00pm / Sun Apr 4 · 3:00pm
ZAZ is a performative archive of Hurricane Katrina survivors' stories, built from their oral histories and recorded testimonies. SOLE Defined's dancers make a percussive score from tap, hard-soled shoes, gumboots (the boot dance of South African miners) and bare feet, woven together with speech, singing, rapping and projections that carry the survivors' accounts and set the piece in New Orleans.
Sat Apr 3 – Sun Apr 4 · 4:00pm/5:00pm
Sat Apr 3 · 4:00pm, West Parish Church (Andover) / Sun Apr 4 · 5:00pm, St. Paul's Church (Brookline)
Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer, sung by mezzo-soprano Kara Dugan, share the programme with Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp, played by artistic director Julie Scolnik and harpist Charles Overton. The ensemble includes violinists Sarita Kwok and Lucia Lin, violist Stephanie Fong, cellist Raman Ramakrishnan, bassist Don Palma, clarinettist Graeme Steele Johnson, hornist Rachel Siders and percussionist Samuel Solomon.
$35 general admission (no senior or student rate)
Sun Apr 4 · 4:00pm
Two world premieres: an Oud Quintet by Kareem Roustom, written for Winsor, and a piece composed by students of Project STEP. Roustom plays the oud himself, and the programme surrounds the new works with Purcell in Colin Matthews's arrangement, Perkinson's Blue/s forms, Britten and Debussy.
Sun Apr 4
A two-part evening built around Brahms's Liebeslieder Waltzes — eighteen love songs for four voices and piano duet — with other pieces the chorus describes as audience favourites.
Sun Apr 4 · 7:30 PM
Caleb Quillen, principal double bass of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, gives a recital built around Schubert's 'Arpeggione' Sonata — written for an instrument that no longer exists and now claimed by cellists, violists and, less often, bass players. Andrew Mark directs the String Masters Series inside the Conservatory's Artistry in Action programme.
Sun Apr 4 · 3:00pm
Three clarinet trios spanning 125 years: Beethoven’s Op. 11, the “Gassenhauer”, Fauré’s Trio in D minor, Op. 120, and Brahms’s Trio in A minor, Op. 114. Clarinettist Robert Patterson, acting principal of the Modesto Symphony and a Boston University faculty member, plays with pianist Max Levinson, first-prize winner at the Dublin International Piano Competition, and the society’s artistic director, cellist Ronald Lowry.
Sun Apr 4 · 3:00pm
Mischa Santora, music director of Boston Ballet, conducts Pro Arte's strings in a programme that opens with the Chorale of Ukrainian composer Hanna Havrylets and Howard Frazin's Peace Cantata, a meditation on war. Spring follows in Vivaldi's “La primavera” from The Four Seasons and Piazzolla's “Primavera Porteña” from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, and the concert closes with the Élégie and Finale of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings.
Sun Apr 4 · 7:30pm
The Brass Bash, directed by Stephen Lange and James Markey, presents students of NEC's Brass Department in mixed brass ensembles and in its horn, trumpet, trombone and tuba classes, ending with a massed brass choir of all the department's students. The concert is supported by a visiting artist fund honouring the memory of Teddy Malasky, a trombonist and conductor who took NEC degrees in 2016 and 2017.
Mon Apr 5 · 7:30pm
The April concert in First Monday at Jordan Hall, NEC's free chamber music series, which for more than forty years has put faculty, distinguished alumni, students and guest artists on stage together. The cellist Laurence Lesser, a former president of the Conservatory, founded it; violist Nicholas Cords, violinist Soovin Kim and pianist HaeSun Paik now curate it as artistic co-chairs.
Tue Apr 6 · 7:00pm
Oboe and flute students from Berklee’s Woodwind Department join two faculty members for an evening of music. Grace Shryock, oboe, plays with Boston Lyric Opera and the Albany and Springfield symphonies and was for four years acting English horn of the New York Philharmonic; Ashley Addington, flute, plays with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Sound Icon.
Tue Apr 6 · 7:30pm
Handel, with NEC's period-instrument Baroque Orchestra joined by the Chamber Singers and the violinist Alana Youssefian Ruocco, who has appeared as soloist with Philharmonia Baroque under Nicholas McGegan, Bach Collegium Japan under Masaaki Suzuki, The English Concert under Harry Bicket and Les Arts Florissants under William Christie. The Conservatory has not yet said which Handel works are on the programme.
Wed Apr 7 – Fri Apr 9
Skylark pairs a new work by Gregory W. Brown with the Requiem of the Canadian choral composer Eleanor Daley, in a programme of contemporary choral writing that the ensemble describes as exploring "shadow, tenderness, and quiet strength." The Grammy-nominated vocal ensemble, directed by Matthew Guard, gives it in Exeter, Newburyport, Falmouth and Chestnut Hill across four April nights.
Thu Apr 8 – Sat Apr 10
Thu Apr 8 · 7:30pm / Fri Apr 9 · 1:30pm / Sat Apr 10 · 8pm
Strauss's Don Quixote, with two of the orchestra's own principals as soloists — Blaise Déjardin, cello, and Steven Ansell, viola — and the Alpine Symphony, the last of his tone poems, tracing a day's climb up a mountain and back through storm and summit. Andris Nelsons conducts.
Fri Apr 9 · 7:30pm
Joseph Schwantner's Aftertones of Infinity, which won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Music, opens a programme of four American scores, two of them built around the saxophone. Timothy McAllister is the soloist in Tyshawn Sorey's Adagio, the saxophone concerto that won Sorey the 2024 Pulitzer, and returns after the interval for Paul Moravec's Saxophone Concerto. Moravec won the Pulitzer in 2004 for Tempest Fantasy.
Fri Apr 9 · 8:00pm
Schubert's “Trout” Quintet, D.667, scored with double bass and named for its variations on his song “Die Forelle”, follows Schumann's Five Pieces in Folk Style, Op. 102, for cello and piano, and Brahms's Viola Sonata in E-flat, Op. 120 No. 2, originally for clarinet. Pianist Benjamin Hochman, an Avery Fisher Career Grant winner, joins Lucia Lin, Rebecca Gitter, Jonathan Miller and BSO bassist Carl Anderson.
Apr 9–11, Jun 6
Fri Apr 9 · 8pm, The Huntington Theatre (Boston) / Sat Apr 10 · 3pm, The Huntington Theatre (Boston); 8pm, The Huntington Theatre (Boston) / Sun Apr 11 · 3pm, The Huntington Theatre (Boston) / Sun Jun 6 · 2pm, Groton Hill Music Center; 7:30pm, Groton Hill Music Center
Believe is the Boston Gay Men's Chorus's full-scale tribute to Cher, moving from heartbreak ballads to defiant anthems through songs about "survival, independence, and living out loud," under a spinning disco ball. The show traces the singer's decades of reinvention and her standing as "a lasting symbol of gay culture." It runs about two hours with an intermission, and every performance is ASL-interpreted.
Sat Apr 10 · 5:00pm
A Far Cry's annual Side by Side, this year on film music, seats students from Project STEP and New England Conservatory inside the orchestra: Takemitsu's Three Film Scores, Korngold's Symphonic Serenade, Arlen's 'Over the Rainbow,' and a world premiere by Quinn Mason written for the players and Project STEP.
Sat Apr 10 · 8:00pm
Cage's Music for Wind Instruments of 1938 and Gubaidulina's String Trio sit beside two recent pieces: Kurt Rohde's blued, a remix after Joni Mitchell for flute and strings, and Christopher Cerrone's Barnes Dances, which adds electronics to a mixed quartet.
Sat Apr 10 · 7:30pm
Three scores with lives in the theatre: Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, which Nijinsky turned into his scandalous 1912 ballet; Rodion Shchedrin's Carmen Suite for strings and percussion, a reworking of Bizet made for Maya Plisetskaya's ballet; and Copland's Rodeo, written for Agnes de Mille in 1942. The orchestra bills them as music that “inspired genius on the stage and controversy in the world beyond it.”
Sat Apr 10 · 3:00pm
A brass programme, the last of three Musicians Unleashed chamber concerts in the Cape Ann Symphony's 75th season, following an October concert for strings and a February programme of music by women composers. Yoichi Udagawa, the orchestra's music director, conducts.
Sun Apr 11 · 3:00pm
Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, written in 1940 on a commission from the Japanese government which then rejected it as unsuitable, before Mahler's Ninth Symphony. The last of the Boston Philharmonic's four subscription programmes, and the last of its final season.
Sun Apr 11 · 4:00pm
The Secret Trio brings together Ara Dinkjian on oud, a fretless lute, Ismail Lumanovski on clarinet and Tamer Pınarbaşı on kanun, a 76-string zither. They play original pieces and traditional melodies that draw on the microtonal modes and improvisation of the Middle East and the dance rhythms of the Balkans, with elements of jazz, rock and classical music, in what they describe as a new type of chamber music.
Sun Apr 11 · 12:00pm
Massenet's Belle Époque tragedy of a girl who chooses pleasure over love, in Laurent Pelly's staging, screened at the Shalin Liu a week after the Met's April 3 transmission. Nadine Sierra sings the title role opposite Matthew Polenzani as her devoted Chevalier des Grieux, with Andrzej Filończyk as her cousin Lescaut. Yves Abel conducts. Note the date change from Rockport's original listing.
$30, $27
Sun Apr 11 · 3:00pm
Benjamin Hochman, the Jerusalem-born pianist who made his Carnegie Hall debut with the Israel Philharmonic at 24, is at the keyboard for Schubert's “Trout” Quintet, D.667, of 1819, with violinist Lucia Lin, violist Rebecca Gitter, cellist Jonathan Miller and BSO double bassist Carl Anderson. Schumann's Five Pieces in Folk Style, Op. 102, and Brahms's Viola Sonata, Op. 120 No. 2, open the programme.
Mon Apr 12 · 7:30pm
Berklee’s Concert Choir, a student ensemble, sings traditional, classical and choral literature in the second of two concerts under this title this season, after one in November. Admission is free.
Tue Apr 13 · 8:00 PM
The Uruguayan pianist Enrique Graf has built a long recording and concert career and holds particular standing in Latin America, where he has championed contemporary composers alongside the classical and Romantic repertory. His programme takes in sonatas by Mozart and Liszt and works by Uruguayan composers. Michael Lewin directs the series.
Wed Apr 14 · 7:30pm
Haydn's D-major Quartet, Op. 76 No. 5, and Mendelssohn's grief-stricken F-minor, Op. 80, frame Anthem, a 2026 work Sauli Zinovjev wrote for the ensemble. The Leonkoro Quartet, whose name is Esperanto for lionheart, took nine prizes at the 2022 Wigmore Hall competition, the youngest group in the field.
Wed Apr 14 · 3:00pm
The Berklee Flute Choir and the Spring Winds and Piano Ensemble play under the direction of the woodwind professor Wendy Rolfe, in a programme the school describes as running from Bach to contemporary writing and from Romantic repertoire to Latin American music.
Thu Apr 15 – Sun Apr 18
Stravinsky's 1951 opera follows Tom Rakewell from an inheritance through a London of brothels, an auction and a madhouse, with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman that took its shape from Hogarth's series of paintings. The score is deliberately eighteenth-century in manner. David Gately directs and Andrew Bisantz conducts.
Fri Apr 16 · 8:00pm
The tenor Lawrence Brownlee and the coloratura soprano Erin Morley sing nineteenth-century French and Italian opera arias drawn from Golden Age, the album they recorded together in 2025. Both are Metropolitan Opera regulars; Brownlee sang the title role in BLO's Mitridate in 2024 and made an early debut with the company as Almaviva in 2002. Co-presented with Vivo Performing Arts.
Fri Apr 16
Gilbert and Sullivan's 1878 comic opera, set aboard a Royal Navy ship where the captain's daughter is in love with a common sailor and the First Lord of the Admiralty has never been to sea. It made the pair's reputation and provoked the copyright fight that sent them to New York. The St Ignatius series presents it.
Sat Apr 17
For his last Symphony Hall concert after thirteen years as music director, Andris Nelsons conducts Mahler's Third Symphony, some ninety minutes across six movements, setting words from Des Knaben Wunderhorn and from Nietzsche and moving from its opening fanfares to a slow closing exaltation.
Sat Apr 17 – Sun Apr 18 · 4pm
Sat Apr 17 · 4pm, Museum of Worcester / Sun Apr 18 · 4pm, Emmanuel Church (Boston)
Chamber music for period winds and strings: a septet by Johann Nisle, an overlooked contemporary of Beethoven, alongside the regional premieres of a quintet by Andreas Lidl and a sextet by Johann Andreas Amon, two composers Haydn admired. Guests Thomas Carroll, clarinet, Allen Hamrick, bassoon, and Elisabeth Axtell, horn, join the flute and strings of Musicians of the Old Post Road, a period-instrument ensemble that specialises in rediscovered repertoire.
Sat Apr 17
Purcell's symphony songs — large-scale works for several voices and strings in which the instruments carry as much of the narrative as the singers, and which are rarely programmed — set beside the trio sonatas of William Boyce, who belonged to the generation after him. The pairing traces what English instrumental writing did with Purcell's example.
Sat Apr 17 · 8:00pm
Boston Dance Theater is a Boston contemporary company under the artistic direction of Jessie Jeanne Stinnett, making ensemble works that pair physically daring movement with visual design and storytelling, and that explore "the complexities of the human experience." Its work grows out of collaboration, and the company returned to the ICA's stage in March 2025.
Sun Apr 18 · 4:00pm
Orpheus plays without a conductor, rotating its leadership among the players as it has since 1972. Paul Huang is the soloist in Richard Tognetti's orchestration of Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, alongside Elena Ruehr's Shimmer and Dvořák. Elena Ruehr taught composition at MIT for three decades, and Shimmer is hers.
Sun Apr 18 · 2:00pm
David Newsam, who has taught classical and jazz guitar at Berklee since 1989 and directs its Classical Guitar Chamber program, is a former artistic director of the Boston Classical Guitar Society and a member of the Back Bay Guitar Trio. He has performed with guitarists Jim Hall and Bucky Pizzarelli and with jazz figures including Clark Terry and Milt Jackson. Admission is free.
Mon Apr 19 · 7:30pm
The NEC Symphony, one of the New England Conservatory's two full student orchestras alongside the flagship Philharmonia, in its April concert. The Conservatory's orchestral programme is led by Hugh Wolff, its Director of Orchestras and a former music director of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Admission is free, with a ticket required.
Tue Apr 20 · 7:00pm
Medieval song and poetry around desire, yearning and fulfilment, taken from the female point of view and sung by a consort of women. The Camerata dates the repertoire to about 1300 and offers it as its spring programme; it sits outside the subscription season.
Thu Apr 22 – Sat Apr 24
Thu Apr 22 · 7:30pm / Fri Apr 23 · 1:30pm / Sat Apr 24 · 8pm
A French programme: Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice, Saint-Saëns's A-minor Cello Concerto with Gautier Capuçon, Saariaho's Oltra Mar for chorus and orchestra, kin to her opera L'Amour de loin, and the second suite from Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, with its sunrise and closing dance. Susanna Mälkki conducts.
Thu Apr 22 – Sun Apr 25
Thu Apr 22 · 7:30pm / Fri Apr 23 · 7:30pm / Sat Apr 24 · 1pm & 7:30pm / Sun Apr 25 · 1pm
The Conservatory's contemporary dance majors take on a demanding bill: a world premiere by Aszure Barton, Bob Fosse's Crunchy Granola Suite, excerpts from Pina Bausch's Palermo, Palermo, Akram Khan's Vertical Road and José Limón's There Is A Time. Four of the five are repertory works by choreographers companies build whole seasons around.
Thu Apr 22 – Sun Apr 25
Thu Apr 22 · 7:30pm / Fri Apr 23 · 7:30pm / Sat Apr 24 · 2pm / Sun Apr 25 · 2pm
Britten’s chamber opera, first performed at Glyndebourne in 1946 to a libretto by Ronald Duncan, retells the Roman story of Lucretia, a general’s wife who is raped by the Etruscan prince Tarquinius and takes her own life. A Male and Female Chorus frame the action. William Lumpkin conducts and Clar Choquette directs, in a co-production of the School of Theatre and the Opera Institute.
Thu Apr 22 · 7:00pm
A wind-quintet programme of Gunther Schuller’s jazz-leaning Suite for Wind Quintet, Amy Beach’s Pastorale, Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles, Valerie Coleman’s Red Clay & Mississippi Delta and the sea-inspired Cargo by Matthew Tirona, the youngest of three generations of Boston composers on the bill. Five BFO players perform, and artistic director Alyssa Wang leads discussion of the music’s historical and cultural context between pieces.
Apr 23/25 · 7:30pm/3pm
Fri Apr 23 · 7:30pm / Sun Apr 25 · 3pm
Two landmark English operas of the 1680s on one bill: John Blow's Venus and Adonis, in which Venus loses her mortal lover Adonis to a boar hunt, and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, which ends in Dido's celebrated lament. Blow's work is thought to have shaped Purcell's. Boston Baroque plays on period instruments under Lionel Meunier.
Sat Apr 24
Verdi's monumental Shakespearean drama Otello, transmitted live in HD from the Met: tenor Brian Jagde in the tour-de-force title role with soprano Ailyn Pérez as Desdemona, in Bartlett Sher's production. Michele Mariotti leads the full forces of the Met orchestra and chorus, screened in cinemas.
Sat Apr 24 · 7:00pm
The season finale is built around the East Coast premiere of Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate's American Indian Symphony, scored for orchestra, chorus and Native vocal soloists. Alongside it come the New England premiere of Danielle Jagelski's Matriarch and a world premiere by composer-in-residence Carlos Carrillo. Tate is Chickasaw and has written for orchestras across the country.
Sat Apr 24 · 8:00 PM
Pianist Kate Liu gives a solo recital. Born in Singapore and raised near Chicago, Liu took third prize and the Polish Radio prize for the best performance of mazurkas at the 2015 International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. She studied with Robert McDonald at the Curtis Institute and at the Juilliard School, and released a debut solo album of Beethoven and Brahms sonatas in 2025.
Sat Apr 24 · 1:00pm
Verdi's late Shakespearean tragedy in Bartlett Sher's production, transmitted live from the Met to the Shalin Liu. Brian Jagde takes on the punishing title role, Ailyn Pérez makes her role debut as Desdemona, and Artur Ruciński is the Iago who poisons the marriage. Michele Mariotti conducts the full Met orchestra and chorus in Boito's tightly wound adaptation.
$30, $27
Sat Apr 24 – Sun Apr 25 · 8pm/3pm
Sat Apr 24 · 8pm / Sun Apr 25 · 3pm
MOMIX, the Connecticut company founded in 1980 by Pilobolus co-founder Moses Pendleton, performs Botanica, an evening-length piece of visual theater that follows the rhythms of the seasons and the passing of a day through images of the natural world. The dancers work with gravity-defying props, cinematic projections and puppetry, in what the company calls a restorative “herbal remedy” for the senses.
Sun Apr 25 · 3:00pm
A new work by Charles Shadle, commissioned by the Society and drawing on scenes and themes from his Choctaw Nation background, sits between Schumann's Märchenerzählungen — lyrical miniatures that suggest childhood stories without telling any of them — and Dvořák's G major String Quintet, Op. 77.
Sun Apr 25
A recorder consort that plays entirely from memory and without a conductor, in a Renaissance programme moving between lamentation and celebration. Past guests of the biennial festival, they appear on the annual concert series for the first time here. The consort's instruments are modern reconstructions of Renaissance recorders in a full range of sizes.
Sun Apr 25 · 3:00pm
Mahler's Second Symphony, the Resurrection, fills the programme on its own — it needs a full orchestra, a chorus and two vocal soloists, and runs about ninety minutes. It closes the Youth Orchestra's season and the Boston Philharmonic organisation's final year, its forty-eighth.
Sun Apr 25 · 4:30pm
A programme titled for Carlos Simon's Fate Now Conquers, which takes its text from a line Beethoven copied into his journal. It sits alongside the ballet music from Mozart's Idomeneo, Haydn's D major Cello Concerto with soloist Jonah Ellsworth, and Beethoven's Eighth Symphony.
Sun Apr 25 · 4:00pm
Rachel Childers, second horn of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 2011 and the first woman in its brass section, gives a faculty recital. A Michigan native, she studied at the University of Michigan and in the first class of horn players at the Colburn School, and was Acting Assistant Principal/Utility Horn of the Colorado Symphony before joining the BSO.
Sun Apr 25 · 3pm
The Grammy-winning Parker Quartet (Daniel Chong and Ken Hamao, violins; Jessica Bodner, viola; Kee-Hyun Kim, cello) plays three Beethoven quartets in a programme drawn from its Monte Carlo Beethoven album: Op. 18 No. 6 in B-flat, the “Harp” Quartet, Op. 74, and the second “Razumovsky” Quartet, Op. 59 No. 2 in E minor. The concert is a Concord Chamber Music fundraiser, with a pre-concert talk by Professor Anne Shreffler.
Sun Apr 25 · 3:00pm
Chorus pro Musica and the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, in what the chorus describes as the orchestra's final season, perform Mahler's Second Symphony, the “Resurrection,” with vocal soloists, organ and offstage brass. Written across nearly a decade and lasting almost 90 minutes, it moves from a funeral march to a choral finale on death, faith and eternal life. Jamie Kirsch is the chorus's music director.
Sun Apr 25 · 3pm
Carol Lewis, the viola da gamba player of Duo Maresienne, plays solo viol music by Virgiliano, Sumarte, Ferrabosco, Hacquart, du Buisson, Sainte-Colombe and Marais. The title comes from Aurelio Virgiliano's Il Dolcimelo, an Italian treatise of about 1600 that includes ricercars for solo instruments, and the programme also takes in English viol music by Sumarte and Ferrabosco and the French school of Sainte-Colombe and Marais.
Sun Apr 25 · 3:00pm
Music director emeritus David Hoose conducts a season finale built around Elliott Carter's Triple Duo (1983), which splits a sextet into three pairs, alongside the “Fiddle Music” movement of Gunther Schuller's Duologue from the same year. The first half brings Juri Seo's “Jack in the Box” for violin and electronics, Augusta Read Thomas's Acrobats, Yu-Hui Chang's Intersect and Richard Cornell's The Light of October, a 1998 Collage commission.
$35 general admission; $15 students (Longy students and faculty free)
Tue Apr 27 · 8:00pm
NEC's graduate conductors take an orchestra of their fellow students through a Brown Hall programme. Joseph Bozich and Leonard Bopp are among those on the podium; the Conservatory frames it as a chance to hear conductors at the very start of their careers.
Wed Apr 28 · 7:30pm
Stefan Asbury conducts the NEC Philharmonia, the Conservatory's flagship student orchestra. Asbury, a British conductor who has taught conducting at the Tanglewood Music Center for many years, also directs NEC's New Music Ensemble; the Philharmonia's other conductors this year are Hugh Wolff, the Conservatory's Director of Orchestras, and David Loebel. Admission is free with a ticket.
Thu Apr 29 – Sun May 9
Frederick Ashton's Cinderella, his first full-length ballet, set to Prokofiev's sweeping score — the fairy godmother, the fairies of the four seasons, the midnight ball and the abandoned slipper, with the stepsisters played broadly for comedy. The Boston Ballet Orchestra plays live.
Thu Apr 29 – Sat May 1
Thu Apr 29 · 7:30pm / Fri Apr 30 · 1:30pm / Sat May 1 · 8pm
Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša leads two countrymen — Suk's Fantastické Scherzo, new to the BSO, and Martinů's Sixth Symphony, a BSO commission written for Charles Munch — with Alexandre Kantorow the soloist in Brahms's turbulent First Piano Concerto, the composer's first large orchestral work.
Thu Apr 29 · 7:30pm
NEC's two choirs sing together under Erica J. Washburn, the Conservatory's Director of Choral Activities: the large Symphonic Choir and the Chamber Singers, a select ensemble of 24 to 30 voices. The concert is billed as Great Music for a Great Space. Admission is free with a ticket.
Fri Apr 30 – Sun May 2
Fri Apr 30 · 7pm / Sat May 1 · 10am & 3pm & 7pm / Sun May 2 · 6pm
A three-day festival on the music of fifteenth-century Burgundy: an opening concert of songs and sacred works by Binchois, Du Fay and Busnoys, Saturday talks by scholars of Burgundian art and poetry, and a closing cabaret in ducal style. Blue Heron and its director Scott Metcalfe host the weekend.
Fri Apr 30 – Mon May 3
Fri Apr 30 · 8pm / Sat May 1 · 8pm / Sun May 2 · 2pm & 8pm / Mon May 3 · 3pm
Ailey's annual Boston residency, in its second season under artistic director Alicia Graf Mack: new works, revivals from the Ailey repertory, and Revelations, the 1960 masterwork the company has closed with for six decades. A spring tradition at the Wang.
Fri Apr 30 – Sat May 1 · 7:30pm
Fri Apr 30 / Sat May 1 · 7:30pm
Violinist Shunske Sato and fortepianist Shuann Chai, making their Boston debut, play a Beethoven sonata for violin and piano, then join L'Armonia Boston for Schumann's Piano Quintet (1842), the work Brahms and Dvořák later followed with quintets of their own. Chai plays R.J. Regier's copy of an 1830s Austrian fortepiano. Sato, a period and modern violinist, is known for his Bach recordings with the Netherlands Bach Society.
$60 ($15 student)
Fri Apr 30 · 7:30pm
Cellist Thomas Barth and pianist Sergey Schepkin close the season with four composers whose names begin with B: Beethoven's Op. 102 No. 1 Sonata, Britten's Op. 65 Sonata written for Rostropovich, Frank Bridge's Four Pieces, and Brahms's F major Sonata Op. 99.
Fri Apr 30 · 7:00pm
Jeremy Filsell, the English organist and pianist, divides a Debussy and Rachmaninov programme between the church’s 2018 Schoenstein organ and the piano. Filsell became organist and director of music at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York in 2019. The concert is free, with a suggested donation, and a reception follows.
Sat May 1 – Sun May 2 · 2pm/3pm
Sat May 1 · 2pm / Sun May 2 · 3pm
Mendelssohn's Elijah, first heard in Birmingham in 1846 and sung there in English, given by the period-instrument orchestra and chorus. This performance also brings back CitySing, in which community singers who have rehearsed the work join the professionals onstage for part of it.
Sat May 1 · 7:30 PM
Clarinetist and pianist Adrian Galante, a young multi-instrumentalist, arranger and composer working in the jazz tradition, closes the Great Hall season. Reviewed at New York's Birdland as "equally gifted as a clarinetist as he is a pianist," he builds a lyrical program moving between both instruments.
Sat May 1 – Mon May 31
A concert made up entirely of new works, commissioned to mark the anniversary of Little Songbook Opera's founding. The company takes its performances beyond traditional concert halls, and supporting the creation and performance of new music is one of its four stated aims, alongside paid work for young and emerging artists and free or affordable concerts.
Sat May 1 · 7:30pm
Adam Golka is the soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, one of only two piano concertos Mozart wrote in a minor key. Golka, born in Texas to a family of Polish musicians and a student of Leon Fleisher at Peabody, won the 2008 Gilmore Young Artist Award. Music director Avlana Eisenberg pairs the concerto with Rossini's overture to The Barber of Seville and Schumann's Fourth Symphony.
Sat May 1 · 7:30pm
David Russell, the Glasgow-born guitarist who won a Grammy in 2005 for Aire Latino and was named a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in 1997, closes the society's 2026–27 season. He has recorded seventeen albums for Telarc, and the New York Times wrote that he made “his mastery evident without ever deviating from an approach that places musical values above mere display.”
Sun May 2 · 4:00pm
Robert Schumann's Op. 40 songs and Clara Schumann's Sechs Lieder aus Jucunde open a programme on love and marriage that ends with Bernstein's Arias and Barcarolles for two singers and piano four hands. Robert Paterson's Extraordinary sits between. Mary Mackenzie and Nathaniel Sullivan sing.
Sun May 2 · 4:00pm
The season closes on musical love letters, among them Peter Lieberson's Neruda Songs, written for his wife Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who had sung and played viola with Emmanuel Music. Schumann, Beethoven and Reena Esmail complete the programme. Lieberson set Neruda's love sonnets in Spanish, and she premiered them in Boston in 2005.
Sun May 2 · 3:00pm
Haydn's Creation, given with full orchestra and chorus. He wrote it after hearing Handel's oratorios in London, and it opens with an orchestral Representation of Chaos before the chorus arrives at the first light. Noah Horn conducts. Almost every number is a picture of something — light, storm, birds, the first animals.
Sun May 2 · 2:30pm
Andrew Cote conducts the orchestra and the Merrimack College Concert Choir in symphonic arrangements of ABBA — Dancing Queen, Waterloo, Mamma Mia, Money, Money, Money, Chiquitita, The Winner Takes It All, Thank You for the Music — and other 1970s material.
Sun May 2 · 3:00pm
The Metropolitan Wind Symphony gives the world premiere of a new commission from John Mackey. The rest of the programme is drawn from the band canon: Arnold Schoenberg's Theme and Variations, Op. 43a, his only original work for band, Wagner's Elsa's Procession to the Cathedral, Michael Colgrass's Old Churches, Steven Bryant's Dusk and Shostakovich's Galop. Middle- and high-school students join the band for the second half.
Adult $20; senior (62+) $15; student (5+) $5; under 5 free
Sun May 2 · 3:00pm
The French pianist Alexandre Kantorow, gold medallist at the 2019 Tchaikovsky Competition, joins the Boston Symphony Chamber Players for Reynaldo Hahn's Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor. The programme also has one of Haydn's "London" Trios, in C for flute, violin and cello, and Martinů's Nonet No. 2 for winds and strings, written in 1959, the year of the composer's death.
Series of 4 Sunday afternoons: $120-$204
Mon May 3 · 4:00pm
Students from the marimba ensembles play compositions and arrangements for marimba and vibraphone, running from contemporary classical writing into jazz and pop, directed by Nancy Zeltsman. Two performances on the day, at 4pm and 7:30pm. This is the second of two such concerts in the season.
Mon May 3 · 7:30pm
First Monday at Jordan Hall's May concert. The free series, founded more than forty years ago by the cellist Laurence Lesser, then president of the Conservatory, brings NEC faculty, distinguished alumni, students and guest artists together in chamber music. It is now curated by three artistic co-chairs: violist Nicholas Cords, violinist Soovin Kim and pianist HaeSun Paik.
Wed May 5 · 1:00pm
Classical works for piano four hands share the programme with chamber music for piano and strings, in a selection that spans centuries, “from Bach to the modern age.” This is the second concert under the title this season, after one in December. Admission is free.
Thu May 6 – Sun May 9
Thu May 6 · 7:30pm / Fri May 7 · 1:30pm / Sat May 8 · 8pm / Sun May 9 · 2pm
Joshua Bell plays Bruch's First Violin Concerto, written for Joseph Joachim, the violinist Brahms would also write for, before Mahler's First Symphony, which weaves one of the composer's own early songs into its opening movement. Joana Mallwitz conducts, closing the season.
Thu May 6 · 7:30pm
The last of NEC's three chamber-music galas of the year, after those in December and April, in which piano trios, string quartets and other groups play in turn through the evening. At this one the Conservatory's student ensembles perform the works they have prepared over the semester with their chamber-music faculty coaches.
Fri May 7 · 8:00pm
Randall Thompson's Alleluia and Poulenc's Gloria both came from Koussevitzky commissions; the Gloria had its premiere with the soprano Adele Addison and the Boston Symphony in 1961. Addison is now in her 101st year. The programme frames Koussevitzky as the figure who made Boston a centre for new work.
Fri May 7 – Sat May 8 · 7:30pm/3pm
Fri May 7 · 7:30pm, Nathaniel Allen House (Newton) / Sat May 8 · 3pm, Goethe-Institut Boston
Oratorios, cantatas, sonatas and harpsichord music by Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665–1729), who played for Louis XIV as a child prodigy and became the first woman in France to compose an opera, Céphale et Procris (1694). Soprano Michele Kennedy, violinist Sarah Darling and harpsichordist Andrus Madsen perform; the second performance is at the Goethe-Institut in Boston.
Sat May 8 – Sun May 9 · 8pm/3pm
Sat May 8 · 8pm / Sun May 9 · 3pm
A world premiere by Cooper is paired with Saint-Saëns's First Cello Concerto, which runs its three sections together as one continuous movement, and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. The Brookline Symphony, founded in the 1950s and revived in 2010 after a hiatus, is made up of volunteer amateur, student and professional players under music director Andrew Altenbach.
Sat May 8 · 7:00pm
Longy's Vox Exchange Ensemble, led by the Lorelei soprano and Longy faculty member Corrine Byrne, sings alongside members of Lorelei Ensemble under the conductor Beth Willer. The programme is music written for women's voices; Lorelei is a Boston group built largely around new commissions for that scoring.
Sat May 8 · 2:00pm
Boston Lyric Opera's community opera project puts Bostonians who answered its story-gathering call on the Symphony Hall stage beside the company's professional artists — a participatory new work assembled from the city's own stories, and the community-facing capstone of BLO's 50th-anniversary season programming.
Sat May 8 – Sun May 9 · 7pm/3:30pm
Sat May 8 · 7pm, Cambridge Friends Meeting House / Sun May 9 · 3:30pm, Follen Church (Lexington)
Sarasa's season closes with composers who broke free of discrimination's chains — de Monte, Beethoven, Casals, Kurt Weill, Mahler and Ethel Smyth — honoring Alma Rosé's music at Auschwitz, with soprano Ute Gfrerer. The 2nd Annual Barbara Kapp Celebration Concert.
$26 advance / $30 door ($10 under-35 & students)
Sat May 8 · 7:30pm
Violinist Amaryn Olmeda is the soloist in Mendelssohn's E minor Concerto, framed by Beethoven's Coriolan Overture and Schumann's Second Symphony — the symphony he finished while recovering from a long breakdown. The Apollo Ensemble opens its dress rehearsal the night before.
Sat May 8 · 1:00pm
David McVicar's Met production of Puccini's thriller of painter, diva and police chief in Napoleonic Rome, recorded in November 2024 and screened again as an encore. Lise Davidsen sings Tosca, Freddie De Tommaso is Cavaradossi and Quinn Kelsey the predatory Scarpia. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts; the Kendall Square showing is the series' last encore of the season.
Sat May 8 – Sun May 9 · 8pm/3pm
Sat May 8 · 8pm, All Saints Ashmont (Dorchester) / Sun May 9 · 3pm, First Church in Cambridge
Seraphim closes its 29th season with English choral music associated with Westminster Abbey and the wider United Kingdom, by Handel, Holst, Howells, Parry and Purcell. The centrepiece is Ralph Vaughan Williams's Mass in G minor for double choir, written in the early 1920s. Eric Christopher Perry conducts, with Heinrich Christensen at the organ; the title puns on the British dish bangers and mash.
Sat May 8 · 8:00pm
Jotaro Nakano conducts a benefit for Vinfen, which marks its 50th anniversary in 2027. The German hornist Felix Klieser, born without arms and the 2014 ECHO Klassik Young Artist of the Year, plays Mozart's Horn Concerto No. 4, and Beethoven's Eroica Symphony closes the program. Cambridge Common Voices, an inclusive chorus founded by Harvard College and Lesley University's Threshold Program, sings a song cycle by Veronica Leahy that it co-commissioned.
Sat May 8 · 7:30pm
The Vista Philharmonic performs Mahler's Symphony No. 2, "Resurrection", which moves from an opening funeral march to a choral finale with off-stage brass. Soprano Kristin Renée Young and alto Emily Marvosh are the soloists, Marvosh singing the "Urlicht" song, and the Worcester Chorus of Music Worcester, directed by Chris Shepard, joins for the finale's setting of Klopstock's resurrection hymn with Mahler's own added verses.
Sat May 8 · 8:00pm
Edward Elwyn Jones, Harvard's director of choral activities, conducts Beethoven's Missa solemnis in D major, Op. 123, with the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus and Masterworks Chorale, together some 200 voices, four vocal soloists and Pro Arte. Beethoven began the mass in 1819 for the installation of his pupil and patron Archduke Rudolph as Archbishop of Olmütz and finished it in 1823, three years after the ceremony.
Sat May 8 · 7:30pm
Max Holman leads the Spectrum Singers in Iberian choral music with flamenco guitar, dance and song, including a choreography made for the concert and set to Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Romancero Gitano, his cycle of Federico García Lorca settings for chorus and guitar. The flamenco artists are singer Ana Villa, dancer Elisabet Torras and guitarist Antonio “Tiriti” Tran.
Red $60 | Blue $40 | Gold $25
Sun May 9 · 3:00pm
Mozart's Oboe Quartet, K. 370 and Mendelssohn's Piano Sextet, written when he was fifteen, precede Bartók's Contrasts — commissioned by Benny Goodman through Joseph Szigeti — and Guillaume Connesson's 1998 Sextet for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, double bass and piano.
Sun May 9 · 2:00pm
The orchestra closes its 75th season with the world premiere of a new work by the local composer Robert J. Bradshaw, commissioned for the anniversary, followed by Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, the “Choral,” first heard in Vienna in 1824, whose finale sets Schiller's “Ode to Joy” for four vocal soloists and chorus. Music director Yoichi Udagawa conducts.
Sun May 9 · 2:00pm
The Wellesley Symphony Orchestra plays two large works with an eye on space. Mason Bates’s The B Sides, composed in 2009, adds electronic sounds to the orchestra as one more instrument. Holst’s suite The Planets follows, each movement named for a planet and its astrological character; the orchestra notes the suite has nearly 100 published orchestral recordings. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, with a reception after the concert.
Thu May 13 – Sun May 23
The season closes with three George Balanchine ballets staged by Suzanne Farrell, one of his muses: The Four Temperaments, his austere neoclassical landmark set to Hindemith and drawn from the medieval theory of the four humours; Mozartiana, to Tchaikovsky's homage to Mozart; and Gounod Symphony.
Thu May 13 – Sat May 15
Thu May 13 · 8:00pm / Fri May 14 · 8:00pm / Sat May 15 · 2:00pm & 8:00pm
Step Afrika!, founded in Washington, D.C., in 1994 by C. Brian Williams, marks more than 30 years of stepping, the percussive tradition rooted in African American fraternities and sororities, with Evolution. The programme pairs new dance works with a piece shaped through the company's long collaboration with South Africa, where it began as a cultural exchange with the Soweto Dance Theatre.
Sat May 15 · 8:00pm
A new Keeril Makan work, commissioned by Radius, gets its world premiere in the season finale, alongside Thea Musgrave's Niobe for oboe and tape, Miguel del Águila's Nostálgica for bassoon and strings, and John Harbison's Nine Rasas for clarinet, viola and piano.
Sat May 15
Birdsong in music across four centuries, from Biber's and Schmelzer's cuckoo calls to Vivaldi and Rameau — built around the world premiere of a Lei Liang work inspired by the song of the Kaua'i 'o'o, a Hawaiian bird declared extinct in 1987.
Sat May 15 · 7:30pm
Mary Beekman's farewell concert closes her 48th and final season as artistic director of Musica Sacra, with choral favourites from her tenure. Beekman has conducted Musica Sacra since 1979; a graduate of Harvard and the New England Conservatory, she has also led the Harvard-Radcliffe Graduate Chorale and Chorus pro Musica, served as interim choirmaster of the Harvard University Choir, and directs the Belmont Open Sings.
Sun May 16 · 3:00pm
The world premiere of a new commission from the Lebanese-American composer Ilyas Iliya, whose Avoonan Dbishmayya the chorus sang in 2025. With it, Charles Fussell's Infinite Fraternity, drawn from Hawthorne and Melville, and Melissa Dunphy's setting of a WWII veteran's testimony in support of marriage equality.
Sun May 16 · 2:00pm
Guitarist Jaclyn Jones, artistic director of the Connecticut Guitar Guild and co-founder of the Luca Duo with mezzo-soprano Meng-Chieh Hsieh, gives a recital. She has premiered music by Sergio Assad and Apostolos Paraskevas, some of it written for her, played at Leo Brouwer's 80th-birthday celebration concert and headlined Odeon's “Women in Guitar” series in New York. She holds two degrees from the Hartt School.
Sun May 16 · 3pm
Countertenor and cornettist Michael Collver joins El Dorado Ensemble, the viol players Carol Lewis, Karen Burciaga, Mai-Lan Broekman, Thomas Conrad and Alice Mroszczyk with Olav Chris Henriksen on theorbo and Baroque lute, in cantatas, suites and canzonas by Schütz, Scheidt, Hammerschmidt, Reusner, Rosenmüller, Pezel and Heinrich Bach. Heinrich Bach, organist in Arnstadt for half a century, was Johann Sebastian's great-uncle.
Sat May 22 – Sun May 23 · 7:30pm
Sat May 22 / Sun May 23 · 7:30pm
Rebecca Clarke's Morpheus for cello and piano opens the ensemble's twenty-ninth season finale, followed by Richard Danielpour's Sonnets to Orpheus, Book I for soprano and chamber ensemble, and Brahms's B major Piano Trio, Op. 8 — the work he rewrote thirty-five years after first publishing it.
Sat May 22
The Boston Cecilia gives the premiere of Ōgane, a new work written for the choir by the composer Derek Hurst and inspired by the sound of Japanese temple bells. It is scored for chorus, vocal soloists and chamber orchestra. Around it the choir sings music by Bach, by the Renaissance Flemish composer Nicolas Gombert, by Blevins and by others. The concert closes Cecilia's 2026–27 season, titled Perspectives.
Sat May 22 · 7:30pm
Kristo Kondakçi conducts the Kendall Square Orchestra's season finale: Copland's Quiet City, for trumpet, cor anglais and strings; Elgar's Enigma Variations, in which the composer sketched his friends in music; and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, after the tales of the Arabian Nights.
$15–$50
Sat May 22 · 7:30pm
Violinist Keila Wakao and cellist Leland Ko, both returning to the Apollo Ensemble, are the soloists in Brahms's Double Concerto, his last orchestral work. Ko took Third Prize at the 2026 Queen Elisabeth Competition and First Prize at the 2024 Naumburg; Wakao won the Menuhin Competition and made her BSO debut at its 2024 Opening Night Gala. Strauss's Don Juan opens, and the 1919 Firebird suite closes.
Sun May 23
Brahms's German Requiem, sung with Chorus Pro Musica. Brahms chose German scripture of his own rather than the Latin mass for the dead, and wrote no part for a soul in torment — the piece addresses the living who mourn rather than pleading for the dead.
$11.50–$46.50
Sun May 23 · 3:00pm
The last concert of the Lydian String Quartet's Beethoven+ series, which presents the complete Beethoven string quartets across two seasons with the Goethe-Institut and ends near the 200th anniversary of the composer's death. Beethoven's Op. 74, the Harp, and Op. 130 with the Grosse Fuge, Op. 133, frame Birke Bertelmeier's Crisis. The quartet is Clara Lyon, Julia Glenn, Mark Berger and Joshua Gordon.
Sun May 23 · 3:00pm
Oboist Jennifer Slowik joins Pro Arte string players, led by concertmaster Julia Cash, for a Salon Series programme of English and Hungarian music: Britten's Phantasy Quartet for oboe and string trio, written in 1932 while he was a student at the Royal College of Music, Elgar's Andante and Allegro, and Dohnányi's Serenade for String Trio in C major, Op. 10, a five-movement work from 1902.
Wed Jun 2 · 7:30pm
The soprano Nadine Sierra sings Puccini and Bellini alongside Neapolitan song and Latin American repertoire by Ponce, Turina and Villa-Lobos, with the Metropolitan Opera assistant conductor Bryan Wagorn at the piano. Sierra has sung at the Met, La Scala, the Paris Opera and the Staatsoper Berlin; she was BLO's Gilda in 2014 and its Tytania in 2011. Co-presented with Vivo Performing Arts.
Sat Jun 5 · 12:00pm
The Dominican-born pianist Carlos Vargas joins the Rasa String Quartet for a midday programme of chamber music, the last of this season's four free Roxbury Concert Series dates. Vivo Performing Arts presents the concert in association with the Roxbury Concert Series as part of its Neighborhood Arts programme, and admission requires an RSVP through the series.
Sat Jun 5 · 7:30pm
A Far Cry marks its twentieth season with a masked ball at the BCA Cyclorama, a genre-crossing party moving from Baroque dance to disco, costumes and dancing encouraged. The orchestra promises Mozart alongside Chic, Berlioz alongside the Bee Gees.
Sat Jun 5 · 11:00am
The free family concert is part of Chameleon Arts Ensemble's spring music education programme, which since 2004 has brought interactive concerts, instrument demonstrations and workshops to more than 6,000 Boston Public Schools students. The ensemble, led by the flutist Deborah Boldin, is in its twenty-ninth season of themed chamber programmes. No tickets are required.
Sat Jun 5
Wagner's transcendent final opera Parsifal, screened live in HD from the Met in François Girard's acclaimed production. Tenor Piotr Beczała sings the title role, with mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča as Kundry and baritone Peter Mattei as Amfortas; music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the nearly six-hour work.
Sat Jun 5 · 12:00pm
Wagner's last opera, a five-hour meditation on compassion and the knights of the Grail, returns in François Girard's stark modern staging, transmitted live to Rockport. Piotr Beczała sings the innocent fool, Elīna Garanča the shape-shifting Kundry, Peter Mattei the wounded Amfortas and Jongmin Park the old knight Gurnemanz. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts; expect intermissions and a long afternoon.
$30, $27
Sun Jun 6 – Sun Jun 13
Telemann's Emma und Eginhard, first staged in Hamburg in 1728, is the centrepiece opera of the twenty-fourth biennial festival. It draws on the legend of Charlemagne's daughter Emma, who carried her lover Eginhard, the emperor's secretary, across the snow so that his footprints would not give him away. Lampe's The Dragon of Wantley returns as the festival's chamber opera.
Sun Jun 6 · 3:00pm
Conner Gray Covington conducts the ballet music from Mozart's Idomeneo and the world premiere of Elena Langer's trumpet concerto The Day the Sun Came Round for Tea, jointly commissioned by Pro Arte and its soloist, Benjamin Wright, and inspired by an absurdist poem in which a writer befriends the sun. Louise Farrenc's Symphony No. 2, by the 19th-century French composer and pianist, ends the season.
Sat Jun 12 · 8:00pm
John Frederick Lampe's 1736 burlesque sends up Handelian opera: a dragon is eating Yorkshire and only the local squire can stop it, if he will put down his beer. It ran for forty-five years, the most performed opera in eighteenth-century England. Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs conduct; Gilbert Blin directs this encore of BEMF's 2023 staging.
Sat Jun 12 · 1:00pm
The Metropolitan Wind Symphony hosts its 33rd annual Boston Festival of Bands, a free day-long concert held each year on the second Saturday in June, in which six invited bands each play a set of 35 to 40 minutes alongside MetWinds. Past festivals have drawn community and college wind ensembles and the occasional brass band from across New England. MetWinds' music director is Gabe Southard, who conducts at Gordon College.
Sun Jun 13 · 3:00pm
The Brookline Symphony Orchestra, a community orchestra of volunteer amateur, student and professional players led by music director Andrew Altenbach, closes its season with a summer pops concert. Last June's pops programme mixed selections from Wicked, Encanto, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Toy Story with Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain and a movement of Gounod's Petite Symphonie.
Sun Jun 13 · 3:00pm
The Conifer Quartet, a string quartet drawn from Pro Arte's own players, gives this Salon Series concert: principal second violin Colin Davis, violinist Lisa Goddard, principal viola Anne Black and principal cellist Steven Laven. The series is Pro Arte's chamber strand, in which small groups from the orchestra's cooperative present music outside the full Ensemble Series, informally and with time to talk with the musicians.
Thu Jun 17 – Sun Jun 20
Thu Jun 17 · 7:30pm / Fri Jun 18 · 7:30pm / Sat Jun 19 · 7:30pm / Sun Jun 20 · 5pm
Osvaldo Golijov's Ayre, a song cycle staged as opera and sung by Ailyn Pérez in Ladino, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Sardinian and English, reaching for the moment before Muslim, Jewish and Christian Spain came apart. A new BLO production with the company's orchestra.
Sun Jun 20
John La Montaine’s pageant for narrator, solo voices, chorus and orchestra, written for the American Bicentennial, draws on historical texts for a portrait of the nation’s founding, moving “between reflection and celebration.” Its original 1976 production was conceived and directed by Sarah Caldwell. The title is shared with an anthem by William Billings. BMOP revives it for America’s 250th anniversary.
