Upcoming Concerts & Performances
6 upcoming concerts and performances from Emmanuel Music, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All classical in Greater Boston →
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
