American music, Symphony Hall's 125th anniversary, and the natural world: Inside the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 2025-26 season
Moreover, he said, the upcoming season 'represents the beginning of a deep exploration of the humanities' in the orchestra's work, with more supplementary events hosted by the BSO's humanities institute to be announced at a later date. 'We're beginning to weave big ideas and big questions into our work, as a way for our art form to have a dialogue between the past and present,' Smith said.
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The 'E Pluribus Unum' programming is dispersed throughout the season, beginning with an all-American gala with music director Andris Nelsons on the podium during the season's opening weekend (Sept. 19), and concluding with John Adams's 'Harmonium' in the final program of the season, paired with Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 and conducted by Dima Slobodeniouk, a frequent guest whom Smith described as a 'great friend of the orchestra.' (April 30 - May 3)
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However, many of the 'E Pluribus Unum' highlights are concentrated in January 2026, including concert performances of Samuel Barber's 'Vanessa' presented in collaboration with Boston Lyric Opera, conducted by Nelsons with soprano Jennifer Holloway in the title role and Marshfield-grown mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey as Erika (Jan. 8 & 10); an all-John Williams program, also conducted by Nelsons and featuring pianist Emanuel Ax (Jan. 22 - 25), and the Boston premiere of BSO composer chair Carlos Simon's gospel-inspired 'Good News Mass,' conducted by BSO artistic partner and youth and family concerts conductor Thomas Wilkins (Jan. 29-31).
Nelsons is helming 14 different programs during the season, his twelfth as music director. His dance card includes 'Missa solemnis' (Oct. 9-11), Bernstein's 'Chichester Psalms' (Jan. 15 & 17), John Adams's Violin Concerto, featuring Augustin Hadelich (Oct. 16-18), and a shared date with 2025 Tanglewood Music Center conducting fellows Leonard Weiss and Yiran Zhao (April 3).
The season's lineup of guest conductors includes Jonathon Heyward and Nodoka Okisawa, making BSO debuts; Andrey Boreyko and BSO assistant conductor Anna Handler, making planned Symphony Hall debuts; and several familiar faces including Herbert Blomstedt, Domingo Hindoyan, Thomas Adès, Susanna Mälkki, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Scheduled soloists with the BSO in the coming season include Yuja Wang, Seong-Jin Cho, Midori, Yunchan Lim, and Joshua Bell, among others.
Hadelich, who made his BSO debut in 2012, performs several times in the coming season as artist in residence, offering a solo recital (Oct. 19) and chamber performances with pianist Orion Weiss (Feb. 1) and the Boston Symphony Chamber Players (Feb. 15) in addition to appearing in two programs with the orchestra.
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In addition to its subscription programming, the BSO is also hosting three touring orchestras for single dates at Symphony Hall. The Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra makes its Boston debut on Nov. 14; Nelsons brings the Vienna Philharmonic and soloist Lang Lang through on March 3, in a co-presentation with Celebrity Series of Boston; finally, the orchestra of Interlochen Arts Academy visits on March 15 with Cristian Măcelaru conducting a program including a new work for cello and orchestra by Wynton Marsalis, featuring Yo-Yo Ma.
The Boston Pops also have several dates – most of them conducted by Keith Lockhart – dispersed throughout the season, presenting programs that will celebrate the work of Lin-Manuel Miranda (Sept. 20), Day of the Dead (Nov. 1), Lunar New Year (Feb. 21), and Irish musical traditions (March 14). 'We're finding opportunities to weave Boston Pops programming into the season broadly,' Smith said, 'anchored by Holiday Pops and Spring Pops.'
The season's opening festivities commence on Sept. 17 with a free Concert for the City, featuring the BSO, Pops, and Tanglewood Festival Chorus with Nelsons, Lockhart, and Wilkins sharing the podium. As has become custom, a plethora of Boston-based groups will be offering pre-concert performances around Symphony Hall.
Subscriptions are available now, with single tickets on sale July 31.
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
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San Francisco Chronicle
7 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
The finale after the finale: S.F. Symphony Chorus shines in Verdi's Requiem
Like a baseball game rescheduled after a rainout, there was one more concert on the San Francisco Symphony's season calendar after last week's grand finale with outgoing Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. The orchestra staged its makeup performance of Verdi's Requiem on Friday, June 20, a concert that was canceled during the Symphony Chorus' strike in September last year. James Gaffigan generously stepped in to conduct the work, which Salonen would have led in the fall. The program is slated to be repeated on Sunday, June 22, at Davies Symphony Hall. After its extraordinary contributions to Salonen's farewell performance of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2, the Chorus showed it was worth every penny of the anonymous $4 million gift made in the months following the strike. The singers came to the fore not just in the 90-minute Requiem, normally programmed by itself, but in a first part that included three choral pieces by Gordon Getty, himself a generous donor to the Symphony (and a co-founder of San Francisco Classical Voice). Getty's works are genial, melodic and accessible, and Gaffigan, a friend of the composer, led them deftly and with evident care. The Intermezzo from Getty's 2017 opera 'Goodbye, Mr. Chips' begins delicately, with spare lines in the marimba giving way to the harp, then acquiring a more definitive melodic profile in the strings. It's a meditative piece that finds an unexpected climax when the choristers interject a school hymn, almost as if overhead from afar. The Chorus also gave fine performances of 'Saint Christopher' (2024), which features effective writing for voices, and 'The Old Man in the Snow' (2020), a more substantial work in several sections that Getty skillfully sets apart with different instrumentation, including a trombone choir, keyboards and mallet percussion. If the performance of the piece as a whole lacked finesse, their contributions were nonetheless stellar. The singing was artful, from the opening 'Requiem aeternam,' with the sound humming in the air through the nasal consonants, to the explosive 'Dies irae' and the stentorian 'Rex tremendae.' The women made a luminous entrance in the 'Lacrimosa' at the line 'Huic ergo parce, Deus' (Therefore spare him, O Lord), and the whole chorus concluded with the fearful declamation and hortatory final fugue of the 'Libera me.' The singers encompassed the range of Verdi's writing in finely balanced sound that pulled emotion from every chord change. Gaffigan's conducting, however, emphasized drive and the titanic climaxes while shorting the Requiem's poetic side. Certainly, this is a public religious work, conceived as a memorial to Italian art — first to the composer Gioachino Rossini and then, when that initial plan fell through, to author Alessandro Manzoni. But it's not only theatrical. This interpretation was driven by inflexible tempos and a sameness to all of the climaxes and fortissimo outbursts that ultimately became wearing. Though the orchestra played well, earning deserved applause, the performance was missing a sense of transcendence and the overarching struggle of mourning and fear giving way to tranquility and acceptance. The soloists — soprano Rachel Willis-Sørenson, mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, tenor Mario Chang and bass Morris Robinson — were generally excellent. The notable exception was Chang's effortful 'Ingemisco' prayer, sung without any bloom in the tone and generally unresonant and unconvincing. The violins joined Willis-Sørenson in a moving 'Sed signifer sanctus Michael' (Let the standard-bearer holy Michael), the soprano singing sweetly in one of the score's many standout lyrical moments. If there had been more of those, this Requiem would have been even better.
Chicago Tribune
an hour ago
- Chicago Tribune
Review: Giancarlo Guerrero steps into new Grant Park Music Fest role with a pair of genial and dynamic programs
Talk about a perfect storm. On Wednesday, Giancarlo Guerrero's much-fêted debut as principal conductor and artistic director of the Grant Park Music Festival was dampened by relentless rain. Audiences scrunched under the Jay Pritzker Pavilion fringe, only to play musical chairs dodging the structure's many (and ever-changing) leaky spots. When they weren't doing that, seat shuffles and squabbles competed with the evening's violin concerto. But if Guerrero appeared unflappable onstage, it's because he's been there before. He made his sophomore appearance with the orchestra in 2014 under nearly identical circumstances, down to the solo string showcase and contemporary American opener. Despite the lousy weather, that appearance impressed festival musicians enough to fast-track Guerrero to the top of their director wishlist a decade later. While last week's storm never erupted into thunder, musical lightning struck twice here with yet another exuberant, water-resistant stand by Guerrero on Wednesday, followed by a masterful account of Mahler's Symphony No. 1 on Friday. Wednesday's concert included two harbor works: 'An American Port of Call,' by Virginia-based composer Adolphus Hailstork, and Leonard Bernstein's 'On the Waterfront' suite. Conducting with his pointer fingers rather than a baton, and sporting a new goatee, Guerrero led a sparky, whistle-clean run of Hailstork's eight-minute curtain raiser. But when the music dissipated into quietude — recalling a boat drifting far off from shore, surrounded only by blue horizon — Guerrero guided the music with expansive ease. Bernstein's 'Waterfront' benefited from the same balance of gusto and intuitive pacing. Patrick Walle's horn solo up top sounded suspended in time, before an increasingly feral orchestra jerked us back to street level. Amid the ferocity, the Grant Parkers always sounded whetted and clean, moving through the works' shifting meters with fearsome precision. In the final windup to the end, electric energy gave way to ringing, Mussorgskyan grandeur. Between the Hailstork and Bernstein, Jeremy Black returned to the festival as both concertmaster and featured soloist, offering up the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. Even the brunt of the evening's downpour couldn't wash away the strong impression left by this filigree, soulful performance. Black's sound in the opening theme and balladic second movement was sugared but never treacly. Meanwhile, the Allegro molto vivace coasted along serenely, Black's bel canto phrasing and pristine intonation never betraying its finger-flying briskness. Promisingly, Guerrero's orchestral accompaniment was every bit as tasteful. Negotiating solo string balance in the park is always just that — a negotiation — but Guerrero hit the sweet spot of clarity and restraint. The orchestra was able to be a bit more gutsy under Friday's soloist, Pacho Flores. The Venezuelan trumpeter has a sparkling sound, which he dispatched with doting attention to phrase and line in Arturo Márquez's lively, if unseasonal, 'Concierto de Otoño' ('Autumn Concerto'). The work was specifically composed for Flores in 2018, taking unabashed advantage of not just the trumpeter's lyricism but his gatling-gun articulation, unflappable stamina and chameleon flexibility. (He traded four different horns across the 20-minute piece: C and D trumpets in the outer movements, then a flugelhorn and soprano cornet in the middle.) Flores also knows how to work a crowd. Rather than shooting to the stratosphere in his third-movement cadenza, he crawled to the bottom of his range — an amusing subversion of trumpet tropes. He then turned his bell directly at Guerrero and playfully pppththhed at him through his horn, prompting a teasing 'what gives?' shrug from the conductor. That said, it's hard to endorse Márquez's concerto beyond a mere virtuoso vehicle. The orchestral backing is often trite, cycling through the same progressions for what feels like minutes at a time. If the concerto's many flavors of theme-and-variation were engrossing at all, it was entirely thanks to Friday's soloist and orchestra, both playing with tempera-rich color and joie d'vivre. For pops-adjacent music under a more skillful hand, look to Flores himself. He opened and closed his appearance with two self-penned numbers: 'Morocota' (named for a $20 Venezuelan coin) and 'Lábios Vermelhos' ('Red Lips'). Originally recording both with guitar accompaniment for a 2017 Deutsche Grammophon release, Flores sang through his horn with a suave melodiousness that would have done the Rat Pack proud, with just a shimmer of vibrato where it counted. His lush orchestral arrangements would have been right at home in that milieu, too. At one point in 'Lábios Vermelhos,' section trumpets got in on the fun, with a sneering little interjection. Yet another short, Latin-inspired curtain raiser opened the concert: 'Baião n' Blues,' by Chicago composer Clarice Assad. A staple of the Carlos Kalmar years, Assad's inclusion in Guerrero's opening week bodes well for the new festival chief's attention to local composers. Ultimately, though, this performance had some of the same early-season jitters as last week's opener, with a scraggly opening and subdivision disagreement among the violins. 'Baião n' Blues' already isn't Assad's most compellingly structured piece, but a more honed performance might have made a better case. While Mahler sought to depict the world's natural beauty and bizarre juxtapositions in his music, he perhaps didn't anticipate contending with throbbing helicopters, the squeal of a coach's whistle, and hot rods sputtering down Lake Shore Drive on Friday. 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New York Post
5 hours ago
- New York Post
Mark Titus rips ESPN for ruining NBA Finals with too much Stephen A. Smith: ‘This guy's awful'
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