Upcoming Concerts & Performances
32 upcoming concerts and performances from Boston Symphony Orchestra, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All classical in Greater Boston →
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sat Nov 14 · 2:00pm
Painter Makoto Fujimura, whose slow Nihonga practice David Brooks called 'a small rebellion against the quickening of time', speaks on kainos, newness as transformation, drawing on his book Art + Faith and his Qu4rtets project after T.S. Eliot. A BSO string quartet plays one of the late Beethoven quartets that shaped Eliot's poem. A Creation Festival afternoon at Tremont Temple.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
