At the Frick, violinist Francisco Fullana kicked off their concert season by building out the sound world that Goya may have experienced with the Dolphins and Viano String Quartets, Spanish guitar, and a flamenco dancer. I enjoyed how he took it one step further with a contemporary piece that explored what his world might’ve sounded like today. And at St. Mazie’s, Concert Social paired quartet music with mingling, which was thoughtfully curated and had easygoing feel to it.

So as the costumes are put away and the barricades get plucked from the streets, you may be wanting to carve out a couple hours in a dark room with some absorbing music as a reset. November can certainly turn that desire into reality. Death of Classical presents a slate of nocturnes in an uptown church, Tertulia presents the adventurous Poiesis Quartet with drinks and bites at OASES Café, and the Met Cloisters celebrates Morton Feldman with his Violin and String Quartet inside its medieval chapel.

Here are the performances worth hearing this month.

The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

Ólafur Arnalds

The Town Hall, Midtown · Wed, Nov 4 & Thu, Nov 5, 8pm

Ólafur Arnalds writes music you can’t help but feel deeply. It’s spare and dreamy, spun from a delicate touch of the piano with a ripple of strings that open up the space around you, like staring off into the horizon and tapping into your core memories. I first came across his music watching Netflix’s Broadchurch, its piano and string themes deepening the uncertainty within the plot and the characters’ consciences. He’s since won a BAFTA for scoring Broadchurch and has put out about a dozen albums. Add strings, synths, and a lighting rig, and Town Hall starts to feel like an Icelandic winter night with the aurora overhead.

Go if: you want a night of piano music that feels like looking out at the horizon.

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra: Home, Suite Home

Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Tue, Nov 17, 7:30pm

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October’s overflow of concerts could just be the traffic jam of new seasons starting and ensembles making their first fall appearance, which makes picking out the most compelling ones nearly impossible. The approach I took this month was to let the stories behind each ensemble and composition lead the way.

Poet Ross Gay’s poem Be Holding turns an iconic shot by Julius “Dr. J” Erving into a meditation on Black joy, flight, and grief, offering a tension between capturing someone and holding them, now scored for the stage by Pulitzer winner Tyshawn Sorey. PUBLIQuartet’s new album Rhythm Nation, which takes its name from the Janet Jackson record that violinist Jannina Norpoth grew up on, makes a thorough case across its thirteen tracks that American music can’t be derived from just a single lineage. Then there’s Hania Rani, whose piano concerto is partly inspired by Josima Feldschuh, a child prodigy who played and composed music in the Warsaw Ghetto of Rani’s native Poland, connecting her short life to Ukraine and Gaza today.

Here are the stories worth hearing this month.

The Concerts

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The Phil is making the biggest splash of all at Radio City Music Hall to celebrate its new season with Gustavo Dudamel officially installed as music director. Then there’s a citywide festival that marks the centennials of the two New York School composers Morton Feldman and Earle Brown with seventeen concerts exploring their bodies of work that will run through November.

Chamber music is scattered across the city with BlackBox Ensemble performing at the Roerich Museum, Will Liverman staging his song cycle with live dance and illustration at Lincoln Center, and Camerata Nordica making the trip from a small town in Sweden to play the Mendelssohn Octet from memory at Carnegie.

On the experimental side Claire Chase releases the newest Density 2036 commission (Terry Riley’s The Holy Liftoff), harpist Lara Somogyi creates expanses of sound at National Sawdust, and A Winged Victory for the Sullen performs two nights at Pioneer Works, their first North American tour in over a decade.

Here’s what I’m most looking forward to this month.

The Concerts

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August in New York usually means the concert calendar is still on summer vacation. Orchestras retreat to ski towns and wooded corners of New England, chamber ensembles play breezy amphitheaters and barns, while the opera houses and halls back in the city stay dark as they prepare for the fall season. And yet the anticipated lull gets filled up with some of the most concentrated new music programming we’ll see all year.

TIME:SPANS takes over The DiMenna Center for two weeks with some of the best contemporary groups performing today for an exploration in twenty-first century music. JACK Quartet plays Georg Friedrich Haas’s Eighth Quartet bookended by two striking pieces by Cenk Ergün, while Parker Quartet goes for a Kurtág-heavy program (he turned 100 in February and is still writing!). Alarm Will Sound takes on Haas’s in vain, seventy minutes with the hall in the dark for stretches, which we’ve seen Parlando do earlier this year. Talea Ensemble opens the festival with Wolfgang Rihm on the 8th and closes with Rihm’s student, Rebecca Saunders, on the 22nd.

After back to back years of astounding performances on Little Island, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo returns for five nights for a “Minimalism” residency. NY Phil principal clarinetist Anthony McGill plays a Sora salon at Hotel Chelsea, then a Billy Childs premiere with his brother Demarre a few days later. We add a new venue to our watchlist with Jazz sensation Hiromi bringing her piano quintet to Blue Note with PUBLIQuartet. Here’s what I’d show up to this month.

The Concerts

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Death of Classical does what it does best, staging Beethoven’s final quartet by candlelight in the Green-Wood catacombs, handed to a young, exceptional group in Poiesis. And No Fun New Perspectives pulls the legendary noise festival out of a seventeen-year retirement for three nights at Roulette. Add two Teatro Grattacielo operas downtown at La MaMa, an all-star Schumann run at 92NY, and free concerts in the parks, and it turns out there’s plenty worth leaving the apartment for. Here’s what I’d show up to this month.

ODEA covers NYC’s classical and experimental music scene—monthly concert picks researched and curated so you don’t hear about them a week too late. Subscribe for free and stay ahead of the curve.

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The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

Bell–Isserlis–Denk Trio & Friends

Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92NY, Upper East Side · Tue, July 7 & Thu, July 9, 7:30pm

I’d buy a ticket to see any one of these three play solo. Getting Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis, and Jeremy Denk in one room playing as a trio is the rare case that you won’t want to miss. They’ve split their reunion into two nights, both all-Schumann, with completely different programs, so you can do one or make it a double feature.

Concert I (July 7) builds to the Piano Quintet in E-flat, the piece that more or less invented the genre. Schumann wrote it in a few weeks in 1842, his “year of chamber music,” paired the piano with a string quartet in a way nobody really had before, and when Clara got sick before the private premiere, Mendelssohn sat down and sight-read the brutal piano part cold. Concert II (July 9) goes deeper into the catalog: the rarely played G-minor trio, the lyrical Three Romances, and the Piano Quartet, the Quintet’s quieter twin in the same key, famous for one of the most beautiful cello melodies in all of Romantic music.

Go if: you want three soloists who could each headline alone going deep on Schumann.

Beethoven: String Quartet Op. 135 & Jeff Scott NYC Premiere

Green-Wood Cemetery, Greenwood Heights · Thu–Fri, Jul 9–11, 6pm & 7:30pm

Poiesis Quartet just won the 2026 Cleveland Quartet Award, their latest prize that they can add to their growing collection. I can attest they’ve been cleaning up competitions and seem to be touring non-stop. Tonight they bring Beethoven’s Op. 135—the last quartet he finished, months before he died—into a place built around death. It’s the odd one out among the late quartets: compact, light on its feet where the others sprawl and rage. Over the finale Beethoven scrawled a question and its answer, “Must it be? It must be,” and hearing that exchange underground in a catacomb gives the question a weight no concert hall in the city could. Also on the bill is the NYC premiere of Grammy-winning composer Jeff Scott’s Tapestry of the Beloved Beatified, a work honoring queer-rights figures including Marsha P. Johnson, Harvey Milk, and Jeanne Manford.

Go if: you want Beethoven’s last word delivered by candlelight in a Brooklyn crypt.

False Harmonics #26: Conrad Tao, Aaron Turner & Randall Dunn, Charmaine Lee

Pioneer Works, Red Hook · Tue, Jul 14, 7:30pm

False Harmonics is Pioneer Works’ long-running experiment in testing the limits of sound. Each installment brings musicians together around a single idea and this one is the body: music made at the edge of what a performer can physically sustain and what that does to everyone listening. Conrad Tao opens with Ustvolskaya’s sixth sonata, slamming tone clusters with his forearm, the kind of athletic playing he’s known for. Charmaine Lee fuses voice and feedback; Aaron Turner and Randall Dunn close by pushing subsonic frequencies into your chest. Come out to Red Hook, make a day of it, and end it here.

Go if: you want a visceral listening experience.

Solo and Chamber Music

Smaller forces, tightly curated programs.

Carnegie Hall Citywide: Ivalas Quartet

Madison Square Park · Wed, Jul 8, 6pm · Free

The Ivalas Quartet, formed at Michigan in 2017 and recently Juilliard’s graduate resident quartet, has built its name on setting BIPOC composers alongside the canon, and this free program is no exception. You get Angélica Negrón’s playful, electronics tinged bubblegum grass/peppermint field, Derrick Skye’s Deliverance (which they premiered on a 2024 Caramoor commission, with a recording due this year), Bloch’s brief, impressionistic Paysages, Jessie Montgomery’s Strum and Dvořák’s sunny “American” Quartet, which we’ve already heard plenty of this year. Wide range for a free hour in the park.

Go if: you want to enjoy your chamber music outdoors.

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center: Summer Evenings VI

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Sat, Jul 25, 5pm

I was surprised to see Ben Franklin had penned a string quartet. But then again, what couldn’t this guy do? He scored it for three violins and a cello, then had every player retune so the whole thing plays on open strings, no fingering at all, basically so his amateur friends in Paris could get through it. Some scholars call it a musical farce. They’re not wrong.

CMS opens the last of their Summer Evenings with the quartet, then spends the night showing how far the form traveled. Haydn’s “Joke” quartet, which fakes its own ending so you clap too early, plus Mozart, Hugo Wolf, and bits of Wynton Marsalis’s At the Octoroon Balls, where the quartet picks up blues and New Orleans second-line. Free if you win the TodayTix lottery, with wine in the lobby after.

Go if: you want to hear what Franklin and Marsalis do to the same four instruments.

Experimental/Immersive

Cross-genre work, unusual spaces, and concerts that upend expectations.

No Fun New Perspectives

Roulette, Downtown Brooklyn · Thu–Sat, July 9–11, 8pm

No Fun Fest was the noise world’s defining gathering in the 2000s, the festival that proved experimental music and noise had a real scene in New York. Carlos Giffoni ran it from 2004 until he pulled the plug in 2009, and he hasn’t staged it here since. Now it’s back for three nights at Roulette, and the catch that makes it worth the trip is that every set is a one-off: each combination is a world premiere, players who’ve mostly never performed together, grouped for one night and then gone. You’re buying a chance to hear something that won’t exist again.

Thursday pairs guitarist Bill Nace, half of Body/Head with Kim Gordon, with vocalist and electronic artist Charmaine Lee, who builds entire pieces live out of feedback and her own voice. Friday has Giffoni, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, and Raven Chacon, the first Native American composer to win the Pulitzer for music, all on stage together, plus a duo from electronics experimentalist Keith Fullerton Whitman. Saturday brings Zola Jesus, under her feral noise alias NIKA, in a duo with trumpeter Nate Wooley, alongside the great harpist Zeena Parkins.

Go if: you like your music loud, strange, and a little dangerous.

The Ocean Etched in the Forest

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Fri, Jul 24, 2pm & 7pm · Choose-what-you-pay

Du Yun won the 2017 Pulitzer for Angel’s Bone, an opera about human trafficking, and became the first Asian woman to take the music prize. She’s also a founding member of International Contemporary Ensemble and fronts OK MISS, a band that oscillates between post-punk, metal, and trip-hop. For this piece she and director Julian Crouch spent years with Jino artists in Yunnan, including national heritage inheritor He Guiying, recording children in Bapiao Village singing folk songs that are on the verge of disappearing. The Jino are China’s smallest recognized minority and fewer than half still speak the language. Those recordings get woven together with OK MISS and live theater into an hour-long North American premiere.

Go if: you want a fading folk tradition run through an experimental rock band.

Orchestral

Full symphony concerts, chamber orchestras, and large ensemble programs.

Delirium Musicum

Naumburg Bandshell, Central Park · Tue, Jul 7, 7:30pm · Free

The Naumburg concerts have been giving away free music in Central Park since 1905, no ticket, first-come seating, and this summer they’re handing a night to Delirium Musicum, a conductorless string orchestra out of LA making its New York debut. Twenty-odd young players from nine countries steer themselves all across musical eras. You get Vivaldi’s “Winter” and Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre next to Max Richter’s recomposed Vivaldi, along with Philip Glass, Satie, and Jessie Montgomery’s Banner—her riff on the national anthem written for the tune’s 200th birthday.

Go if: you want a free summer night of music from an orchestra that runs itself.

Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center: Hymn and Reformation

David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Fri–Sat, Jul 17–18, 7:30pm · Choose-what-you-pay

From a quiet moment of zen to high-stakes romantic drama, French conductor Chloé Van Soeterstède has paced this evening with care. Its atmospheric opening of Valentin Silvestrov’s Hymn – 2001 which the Ukrainian composer described as enveloped in silence even though it’s scored for strings. Bringing us out from the stillness is Dutch virtuoso Simone Lamsma performing Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1., all long-breathed melody. Van Soeterstède closes with Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony, which climbs out of brooding low brass and builds its finale on Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress,” as big as the orchestra gets.

The Play of Fate: Alina Ibragimova Leads Mozart and Schubert

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Wed, July 29, 7:30pm

The night runs on Alina Ibragimova, a violinist who comes out of the sprinter’s blocks with full-bore attack, her sound still refined and clear, doing double duty as soloist and conductor. The night opens in the dark with Schnittke’s Moz-Art à la Haydn starting in a blackout with the players scratching at fragments of a lost Mozart pantomime. Then they wander the stage and, à la Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, peel off one by one until it’s empty. Then Ibragimova steps forward for Mozart’s bright Violin Concerto No. 3 and closes with Schubert’s Death and the Maiden in Mahler’s version for full string orchestra.

Go if: you want a violinist running the whole show.

Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center: A Mother’s Love

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Fri, Jul 31 & Sat, Aug 1, 7:30pm

Jonathon Heyward is back this summer with another thoughtfully curated program, this one centering on the raw emotional weight of motherhood. The centerpiece is the US premiere of Jessie Montgomery’s These Righteous Paths, a cello concerto she wrote out of grief for her mother, the Black theater pioneer Robbie McCauley, drawing on McCauley’s own plays and poems. It’s shaped by Sankofa, the Ghanaian idea that you look back in order to move forward. The soloist is Abel Selaocoe, a South African cellist who sings while he plays. To bring the journey home, Brahms’s Second Symphony closes the night, a piece that masks its own deep undercurrents of heartbreak with lush, sunny radiance. Tickets are choose-what-you-pay.

Go if: you want to hear a cello concerto that speaks to you in a new way.

Opera & Staged Works

Opera classics, new productions, intimate stagings, and anything that tells a story through music and bodies in space.

Teatro Grattacielo: The Tempest

Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa, East Village · Thu, Jul 16, 7pm & Sat, Jul 18, 3pm

Joseph Summer’s opera of Shakespeare’s final masterpiece The Tempest has existed only as a 2015 recording until now, which is a long time to wait for a first staging. The Tempest is really a play about a man who can’t stop directing everyone around him, so Stefanos Koroneos makes Prospero an actual director, a washed-up filmmaker holed up in a decaying ‘80s studio. I’m intrigued by such risk taking in opera that’s as up close and personal as La MaMa offers in its downtown theater. Show up on a hot night and watch a control freak finally call cut and let everyone go.

Go if: you want your Shakespeare up close and a little unhinged.

Teatro Grattacielo: Così fan tutte

Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa, East Village · Fri, Jul 17, 7pm & Sun, Jul 19, 3pm

Così fan tutte is the Mozart opera everyone loves and nobody quite knows how to defend. Two men bet a friend their fiancées will never cheat, then go undercover to seduce each other’s brides-to-be to prove it, and yes, the title roughly means “all women do it.” For two centuries directors have had to figure out what to do with that.

Director Cate Pisaroni’s move is to quit treating the premise like a trap and instead treat love as something you keep negotiating. She drops it into a bare geometric box out of Bauhaus and Lars von Trier’s Dogville, and lets Cupid narrate the whole scheme. Second of Grattacielo’s two summer operas at La MaMa, after their Tempest.

Go if: you’re open to seeing a Mozart classic reinvented.

You’re probably looking for more than just another season brochure. That’s what ODEA is for. We cover the concerts that don’t always get the glossy previews: string quartets in crypts, operas in downtown theaters, new music in old churches. The ones you usually hear about a week too late.

If that sounds like your thing, subscribe, share with a friend, or check out something unexpected. Have a concert to share? Reach out at odea@substack.com.

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Inside the halls, the season isn’t done just yet. Lise Davidsen, fresh off of her Met Isolde this spring, a voice powerful enough to ride over a full Wagner orchestra, makes her Carnegie recital debut on some of the most intimate music there is. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Met Orchestra in Bruckner’s Eighth, ninety minutes of vast sound that bends your sense of time. At the Park Avenue Armory, Joy Guidry takes us through the meditation of prayer in a vulnerable hour for bassoon and electronics. And a free contemporary music festival, in its twelfth year, bets big on emerging composers. Here’s what I recommend this month.

ODEA covers NYC’s classical and experimental music scene—monthly concert picks researched and curated so you don’t hear about them a week too late. Subscribe for free and stay ahead of the curve.

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The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

Lise Davidsen, Soprano, James Baillieu, Piano

Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall · Fri, Jun 5, 8pm

Lise Davidsen’s voice hit territory my ear had no map for when I heard her sing in Tristan und Isolde at the Met this spring. A sound so controlled and so large I felt its density in my chest pinning me to my seat. Lise’s is the biggest voice of her generation with an instrument built to sail over a hundred players in the pit. This is what makes her Carnegie recital debut so fascinating. An all Schubert program that’s some of the most intimate vocal music. Songs first sung for friends in living rooms. She takes us through the composer’s darker side with songs on death, dread, and the supernatural, graciously sparing us with brief moments of calm.

Go if: you want to hear a voice built for Wagner sing Schubert up close.

The Met Orchestra: Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8

Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Thu, Jun 11, 8pm

A towering symphony often called a cathedral of sound. The NY Phil is doing Bruckner’s Eighth the week before, but my money’s on this one. The Met Orchestra spent this spring building enormous Wagnerian climaxes in Tristan Und Isolde and turning out lush strings in Eugene Onegin, two things the Eighth asks for. With Yannick at the helm, it’s the pairing I’d pay to see. Ninety minutes, no intermission, and at its center the longest slow movement in the symphonic repertoire, the one critics have called “sublime” for more than a century. Bruckner wrote like the church organist he was and the conductors who get the Eighth right are the ones who blend the brass into a single organ-like swell that resonates in the silences.

Go if: you want to get lost in the vastness of Bruckner’s sound.

Solo and Chamber Music

Smaller forces, tightly curated programs.

Artists Studio: Joy Guidry

Veterans Room, Park Avenue Armory, Upper East Side · Wed, Jun 3–Thu, Jun 4, 7:30pm

Joy Guidry’s latest project, Five Prayers, feels like a window into her soul. Written during one of the hardest mental health stretches of her adult life, it became a process of finding peace through her traumas and offers five different perspectives. She fills the ornate, 19th-century Veterans Room at the Park Ave Armory with her bassoon and live electronics. Harp and warm low synths support Guidry’s own wordless singing layered on top. It’s a vulnerable moment for an artist who’s been open about her mental health struggles using music as a medium for healing.

Go if: you appreciate an artist’s vulnerability and devotion to their craft.

Conrad Tao, piano

Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center, Upper West Side · Fri, Jun 5, 8pm

Pianist Conrad Tao might call Broken Lines a project or experiment before calling it a recital—fitting, in 250th year of the biggest experiment of them all. Five pieces of American piano music, each one confronting something the composer couldn’t ignore. Rzewski's Which Side Are You On? is built on Florence Reece's 1931 song from the Harlan County coal strikes. Copland's 1941 Piano Sonata was written as Europe collapsed into war. Julia Wolfe's Compassion came out of 9/11. Singleton's In My Own Skin let’s us know exactly where the composer is most at home through two competing sonorities of chorale-like harmonies against running 16th note octaves that nod to Monk and Tristano. The quiet opener is David Lang’s cage, written the day John Cage died in 1992. A spare, two note elegy that became the seed of a whole cycle of memorials.

Go if: you want to watch a pianist bring athletic force to music that demands it.

PRISM Quartet: PREMIERES

Christ & St. Stephen’s Church · Sun, Jun 7, 4pm

Four world premieres in the hands of one of the best saxophone quartets out there makes for an intriguing new music night. PRISM Quartet takes on Henry Vidaver’s Via Appia, which began as a school bike trip down the Appian Way in Rome. When news of Pope Francis’s death broke while he sat in a park full of Easter picnickers, he witnessed celebration quickly turn into shock and grief. Also on the program is Don Byron’s Quartet for Saxophones pulling from 50s and 60s film music and Grant Stewart’s Kind Mothers that’s named for the Buddhist idea that through birth, death, and rebirth, everyone you’ve met was once your mother.

Go if: you’ve got a Sunday afternoon and an open ear.

The Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital Series

NYC parks · Jun 8, 10, 12 & 14, 7pm · Free

Every June the Met leaves Lincoln Center and makes its way to the parks. Free outdoor recitals with big opera voices for 17 years running. Instead of the usual Puccini and Verdi crowd pleasers, this year’s program is all-American for the country’s 250th—Barber, Copland, and Florence Price, all sung by rising Met artists accompanied by piano. Four nights, four boroughs, and bring that blanket in case the seats fill up.

Go if: operatic voices carrying across the grass sounds like the right way to spend a summer evening.

An Evening with Isabel Leonard and Friends

Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Tue, Jun 9, 7:30pm

Isabel Leonard has built her three-Grammy career mostly in Mozart and Rossini, but spent the last few weeks on a press blitz for her role as Frida Kahlo in the Met’s El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego. Her sound has a transportive quality. I heard it pour into Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with the Met Orchestra this past February—I was right there with her on that hot, languid Southern night, in no hurry to leave. She also sang Bernstein’s “Somewhere” from West Side Story, her voice dreamy and hopeful. She’s back at Carnegie with her own Perspectives series joined by flamenco singer Ismael Fernández and dancer Sonia Olla, reimagining her familiar opera roles through Spanish song and dance.

Go if: you want to hear an opera star trade Carmen and Rosina for cante jondo and Spanish song.

America/Beautiful: Min Kwon, Timo Andres & guests

St. Paul’s German Lutheran Church, Chelsea · Mon Jun 22, 7pm

In 2020, pianist Min Kwon felt the country was “quite literally dying” and started cold-emailing American composers asking for variations on “America the Beautiful.” Over seventy pieces came back and this concert give you a taste of fifteen of them. The contributors run from classical to rock to jazz, including Samuel Adler, Stewart Copeland (yes, of The Police), Timo Andres, Fred Hersch, Nico Muhly, Kenji Bunch, and Pierre Jalbert. The hope is that these variations can speak to the question “What is America: is it beautiful, was it ever, will it ever be?” because the years since have only made it harder to answer.

Go if: you’re looking for a one-of-a-kind piano program that reckons with America.

Toomai String Quintet: From Duke Ellington to La Lupe

Scorca Hall, National Opera Center, Chelsea · Sat, Jun 13, 7pm

Toomai String Quintet spends a Saturday night on jazz, mambo and bossa nova, running through Ellington, Machito, Tito Puente, Jobim, La Lupe, with Jennifer Jade Ledesna singing a few. The premise is the long, tangled relationship between American jazz and the music of the Latin American diaspora. You know “Caravan” as Duke Ellington, but did you know the melody is actually Juan Tizol’s? A valve trombonist from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, who joined Ellington’s band in 1929 and became the man who folded Latin music into it.

Go if: a string quintet playing Tito Puente on a Saturday night sound like an easy yes.

Experimental/Immersive

Cross-genre work, unusual spaces, and concerts that upend expectations.

Felipe Lara / Talea Ensemble / Conrad Tao: Mazes and Portals

National Sawdust, Williamsburg · Wed, Jun 3, 7:30pm

Composer Felipe Lara arrived at Berklee from Brazil on a jazz guitar scholarship then went to a Boston Symphony concert one night, heard Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, and walked out fixated on orchestration. He met a bass student named Esperanza Spalding around the same time. Twenty years later, the two of them and flutist Claire Chase premiered his Double Concerto at the LA Phil, the piece that made him a 2024 Pulitzer finalist.

Lara writes for people he’s known forever. Tonight covers five works played by another set of longtime collaborators—Talea Ensemble and pianist Conrad Tao—including the New York premiere of Mosaic Maze and Metafagote, scored for solo amplified bassoon and six prerecorded ones.

Go if: you want a composer portrait built by the people he trusts to play him.

The Next Festival 2026 Featuring Tommy Mesa

National Sawdust, Williamsburg · Sat, Jun 6, 7:30pm

A relic of Covid times I still remember is the 7pm cacophony of pots banged out of windows for essential workers. Andrea Casarrubios wrote a piece about that sound, SEVEN, for solo cello and it traveled to 36 countries and got a Grammy nomination. Tommy Mesa, the cellist who commissioned it, is back at Sawdust to premiere Casarrubios’s new concerto for cello, strings, and percussion, The Book of Signatures, with the Next Festival Fellows. The rest of the night belongs to immigrant women composers from Serbia, Iran, China, Brazil, and Uzbekistan, most of the works newly arranged for the festival’s string players.

Go if: you get excited by a festival that exists to launch the next generation of musicians and composers.

Wet Ink Ensemble: New Works by Kondo, Nealand, Mincek

Roulette, Boerum Hill · Wed, Jun 10, 8pm

If you're even a little drawn to brand new music by people who write as much of it as they perform, Wet Ink has you covered. The adventurous contemporary music collective brings a refreshing eagerness to this concert of three premieres. Jo Kondo, the Tokyo composer who has spent fifty years writing “linear music” note by note in the lineage of Morton Feldman, wrote them a trio for flute, percussion, and piano. Aurora Nealand, their current artist-in-residence, premieres an octet. She’s a New Orleans saxophonist who studied musique concrète and works between Preservation Hall traditional jazz and her own experimental solo project, Monocle. Founding member Alex Mincek’s dectet gets its NYC premiere.

Go if: you’re looking for the cutting edge of new music played by the people who compose it.

MISE-EN FESTIVAL

Six concerts, Jun 16–20 · MISE-EN_PLACE, Harlem, except Sat Jun 20 at Brooklyn College · Free

Every June, the assiduous Ensemble Mise-En throws an under-the-radar festival featuring six concerts interspersed with composer discussions that’s one of the best free things in the city for anyone curious about new music. The festival has always cast a wide net with past editions featuring composer portraits to four hour concerts and this year is no different. The festival’s global open call for scores resulted in hundreds of submissions winnowed down to a handful. You won't recognize many of the names, which is kinda the point.

If you want one to start with, take Saturday afternoon at Brooklyn College, the festival’s only stop outside Harlem. It includes Kari Watson’s VISTAS: WARP, WEFT. Watson builds immersive electronic music on analog modular synthesizers, won the Kranichstein Prize at Darmstadt, and was named a New Artist of the Month by Musical America last year.

Go if: you’d rather roll the dice on music nobody’s heard yet than play it safe.

Orchestral

Full symphony concerts, chamber orchestras, and large ensemble programs.

The New York Philharmonic — Concerts in the Parks

NYC Parks · Tue, Jun 9–Fri Jun 12, 8pm · Free

It’s the kind of tradition that reaffirms why you put up with the exorbitant rents in the city. Right at the eve of summer, stake out a spot on the Great Lawn, assemble the charcuterie and make an evening of it with fireworks as the nightcap. Newly appointed San Franciso Symphony music director, Elim Chan, conducts a program built for everyone. Familiar pieces, fanfares to open, and Saint-Saëns’s exhilarating single movement Cello Concerto No. 1 as the evening’s most beautiful moment, with the Phil’s principal cellist Carter Brey. Be sure to get there early for a good view.

Go if: you’re looking for a NYC bucket list kind of night.

Second Ending Ensemble: Mahler 1 + Bobby Ge

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Sun, Jun 14, 3pm

Mahler’s First Symphony might be his most welcoming. The strings hold a single note across seven octaves to open, evoking morning mist rising from a forest against birds chirping. Fifty minutes later, the journey ends in triumph with seven horns standing up to drown out the rest of the orchestra. I still fondly remember my first time hearing it as an undergrad with The Cleveland Orchestra bringing it to life.

Second Ending Ensemble attracts some of the city’s best players for this performance in one of my favorite halls. Conductor Ian Schaefer is back for the group’s fourth annual concert pairing Mahler with a new piece from Bobby Ge: The Play of Shine and Shade.

Go if: you’re looking to hear one of Mahler’s best symphonies by a top notch orchestra.

The Knights at the Naumburg Bandshell

Naumburg Bandshell, Central Park · Jun 23, 7:30pm, free

Free orchestral music in Central Park, the way the Naumburg Bandshell has done it since 1905. On a mild June night, this could be the easiest good decision in the city. The Knights play Barber’s Adagio for Strings, some Caroline Shaw, and a new violin concerto with Tessa Lark out front. The closer is Colin Jacobsen’s arrangement of Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” the weary, gorgeous 1973 song about being worn down by this country and loving it anyway. Simon lifted the melody from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, but Bach hadn’t written it either. It began as a secular love song Hans Leo Hassler published around 1600, became a Lutheran hymn (”O Sacred Head, Now Wounded”), and only then passed to Bach. One tune: German love song, church hymn, Bach Passion, American folk record.

Go if: you like your classical music outdoors.

You’re probably looking for more than just another season brochure. That’s what ODEA is for. We cover the concerts that don’t always get the glossy previews: string quartets in crypts, operas in downtown theaters, new music in old churches. The ones you usually hear about a week too late.

If that sounds like your thing, subscribe, share with a friend, or check out something unexpected. Have a concert to share? Reach out at odea@substack.com.

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May’s roundup of concerts leans experimental with a strong appetite for new works. That could mean hearing emerging composers premier pieces in the spirit of Morton Feldman at the MATA Festival, or soaking in Alarm Will Sound’s Aphex Twin arrangement for their 25th anniversary concert, or hearing the premier of Nathalie Joachim’s electroacoustic opera-in-progress with the NY Phil that pulls from the freedom movements of the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Pan-African world.

The first weekend alone stacks the Long Play Festival in Brooklyn against the Queens New Music Festival with strong chamber performances including violinist Randall Goosby in recital with pianist Zhu Wang. There’s also a deeply moving Death of Classical performance of Strauss’s Metamorphosen in the crypt under St. John the Divine.

Wynton Marsalis's Symphony No. 5 “Liberty” gets its New York premiere at Carnegie, written for jazz big band and full symphony with Marsalis on trumpet. And the Met opens Gabriela Lena Frank's El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, a haunting reimagining of Kahlo and Rivera reuniting on the Day of the Dead.

Chamber music holds its own this month too with the Isidore Quartet at 92NY and a string trio of touring musicians coming together at Bohemian National Hall. There's a lot to explore this month, so here’s what I’d recommend.

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The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

Isidore String Quartet

Buttenwieser Hall, 92NY, Upper East Side · Sat, May 2, 7:30pm

Winners of the 2022 Banff competition, Isidore String Quartet has gone from breakout group to one of the most in-demand quartets. Their 92NY program includes Haydn’s “Sunrise” Quartet, named for the way the first violin rises out of a held chord at the opening, Billy Childs’s String Quartet No. 4, American Mosaic—three movements that work through American race relations, the violins and lower strings refusing to play together until the finale resolves on a quote of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Brahms’s Third closes the night, written on a happy summer vacation, full of rhythmic trickery and a pastoral movement that just sings.

Go if: you want to catch one of the most promising string quartets out there.

El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego

Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center · May 14–Jun 5

Gabriela Lena Frank’s first opera lands at the Met after a charmed run that started at San Diego Opera in 2022 and has stopped in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago—a level of early traction that’s rare for a new opera. The premise is a Day of the Dead reversal of Orpheus and Eurydice: Frida, three years dead, leaves the underworld for 24 hours to lead Diego on his journey toward death. There’s a trickster keeper of the dead named Catrina, a young actor in drag impersonating Greta Garbo, and a rule that Frida can’t touch the living. Frida lived in chronic physical pain after a streetcar accident in her teens and a touch returns her to it.

Frank wrote the score around marimba and unusual instrumental pairings (two piccolos with celesta, bass clarinet doubled with a high violin) and Nilo Cruz wrote the libretto in Spanish. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts most performances, Isabel Leonard sings Frida, Carlos Álvarez sings Diego. Deborah Colker directs and choreographs after her acclaimed Ainadamar last season.

Go if: you’re a fan of the Met taking on new works.

Sound On: Nathalie Joachim

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Fri, May 22, 7:30pm

Nathalie Joachim is a Haitian-American flutist, vocalist, and composer—Grammy-nominated, signed to Nonesuch Records, and a composition professor at Princeton—whose work centers Black women's voices and the freedom movements of the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Pan-African world.

The Phil commissioned a new instrumental version of Le présent éternel, part of an opera she's developing that draws from Vodou tradition and Black Surrealism. She'll sing it with three other Black women, voicing Vodou spirits across the score. Christopher Rountree conducts—he runs Wild Up in LA and has a knack for programs that don’t feel like the Phil’s usual. Opening the night: Lou Harrison’s 1959 Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra, a gamelan-inspired piece where the violin is backed only by percussion. The Phil’s assistant concertmaster Michelle Kim-Solman takes the solo.

Go if: you want to hear what an artist sounds like at full range.

Experimental/Immersive

Cross-genre work, unusual spaces, and concerts that upend expectations.

Long Play Festival

Multiple venues across Brooklyn · Thu, Apr 30–Sun, May 3 · 4-day pass $235, day passes $95

The Long Play festival gives you the chance to take risks with your taste—to confront the unfamiliar, lean into the unexpected, and see what you make of it. The four-day Brooklyn takeover stretches across classical, experimental, jazz, and contemporary music, and going last year felt like a choose-your-own-adventure game with concurrent performances from noon to night.

I caught BlackBox Ensemble’s deep dive on Julius Eastman and sat with David Lang’s darker as the shift from light to dark brought me into a more reflective headspace. I also discovered pieces that have stuck with me since like Anaïs Maviel’s listen to the rain performed by The Rhythm Method, which I’ve recommended in write-ups since. I’d recommend Long Play to anyone with the time, the means, and the curiosity to spend four days finding out what they didn’t know they liked.

This year’s got a few anniversaries that guide some of the programming: Morton Feldman’s 100th birthday is honored across two performances—Quatuor Bozzini playing String Quartet No. 1 and Charlotte Mundy singing Three Voices. Steve Reich’s 90th gets a Sunday marathon at BAM Fisher with Sō Percussion and guitar quartet Dither tearing through Sextet, Four Organs, Piano Phase, and Electric Counterpoint. There’s a healthy dose of long form, slow burn music (Kali Malone, Sarah Davachi, Lucy Railton’s Blue Veil), big-ensemble showcases (John Luther Adams’s Crossing Open Ground for 40 winds, brass, and percussion in Fort Greene Park; Michael Gordon’s Trance with Ensemble Signal; the Bang on a Can All-Stars premiering a new arrangement of Glassworks), and jazz heavyweights (Billy Hart Quartet, Amina Claudine Myers, and Matthew Shipp).

Go if: you’re ready for a recalibration of your taste.

Queens New Music Festival

Culture Lab LIC, Long Island City · Thu, Apr 30–Sun, May 3 · Festival pass $60, single show $20

While Long Play takes over Brooklyn the same weekend, Queens has its own four-day new music festival running at Culture Lab LIC, a 12,000-square-foot converted warehouse in Long Island City. Random Access Music started this in 2012 and has built it into what The New York Times called Queens “staking its claim for new-music street cred.” This year’s lineup runs eight concerts featuring KOE (a flute-cello duo), Luminae Trio, Queens College Percussion Ensemble, RAM’s resident composers and players, and a “Fifteen Minutes of Fame” night. You’ll hear pieces from emerging voices you probably haven’t caught yet, in a space small enough that you might find yourself talking to the artists afterward.

Go if: you want new music in a room where you can talk to whoever wrote it.

Pulsing Sound Series 9 | Vibrant Matter: Telos Consort

THE BLANC, 15 E 40th St · Sat, May 2, 7:30pm

THE BLANC is the kind of place that should be more widely known. It acts as a blank slate for whatever artists want to do in it—exhibitions, performances, residencies, the occasional fashion show. The Pulsing Sound series is part of their music programming, curated this season by Artist-in-Residence Sofia Ouyang. Telos Consort is main act, a Bang on a Can-mentored ensemble, two years old and already premiering work by composers nobody else is touching yet. Tonight they play works by seven living composers, two of them Ouyang's own pieces. Odds are you'll walk out with at least one composer name you’ll want to remember.

Go if: you’re ready to discover your new favorite place for music.

Alarm Will Sound: 25th Anniversary Concert

Roulette Intermedium, Brooklyn · Thu, May 7, 8pm

The New York Times once called Alarm Will Sound “as close to being a rock band as a chamber orchestra can be,” and 25 years in, that still tracks. The 20 musicians met as students at Eastman in 2001, picked their name off an emergency exit sign, and have kept most of their core lineup in place ever since. They just won their first Grammy(!) in February for Donnacha Dennehy’s Land of Winter. Their anniversary program contains a reinvention of early music, a Jlin reimagining, Aphex Twin and Beatles arrangements, plus a few newer commissions that lean lyric and atmospheric.

Go if: you want a concert that toes the line between classical and electronic.

MATA Festival — INTERVAL: In Between Silence and Stasis

DiMenna Center, Midtown · Thu, May 21–Sat, May 23, 7pm · Festival pass $135, single night $50

MATA is where you go to hear the next Pulitzer winners before they’re nominated. Philip Glass started it 30 years ago and the alumni list now includes MacArthur fellows and Rome Prize winners. This year’s theme is composer Morton Feldman’s centennial, and seventeen early-career composers responded to a call for scores that pick up on his fascination with memory, his subtle inflections in his marathon length pieces, and his careful piecing together of isolated sounds.

The festival spans three nights. Thursday, the Bang Group performs Reich’s Clapping Music with tap shoes and reimagines Feldman’s For John Cage as a tap dance. Friday’s all about extended duration string works including Bunita Marcus’s Two Pianos and Violin, which Feldman himself loved. Saturday closes with BlackBox Ensemble playing two iconic Feldman pieces from the 1970s—For Frank O’Hara and I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg—alongside new works that pick up his idea of “local music,” where the focus is on a single note or chord rather than the whole structure.

Go if: you want new music in the spirit of one of the great American experimentalists.

Yarn/Wire: Currents 2026

Roulette, Boerum Hill · Thu, May 28, 8pm

Yarn/Wire is the Brooklyn quartet that’s been taking on some of the most daring work in new music for the last 20 years. They bring a sound that blends acoustic instruments with electronic manipulation, making you question what you’re actually hearing. Their Currents series is back this year with pieces from Jonah Haven, a Rome Prize laureate writing about the sixth mass extinction and Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir, an Icelandic composer whose immersive music has a strange, elemental beauty to it.

Go if: you’re ready to lower your guard and step into the unknown.

Solo and Chamber Music

Smaller forces, tightly curated programs.

Death of Classical’s After the Fall: Mazzoli + Metamorphosen

The Crypt under the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Morningside Heights · May 1 & 2, 7pm & 8:30pm

Death of Classical curates classical music in venues that match the feeling of the music—crypts, catacombs, cemeteries—and the performances have been some of my most memorable. This installment pairs Missy Mazzoli’s Dark with Excessive Bright (string quintet with violin soloist, title from Milton’s Paradise Lost) with one of my favorite pieces, Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, written in the last days of World War II as Strauss watched German cultural institutions get bombed into rubble. The Strauss is rarely heard in this septet arrangement. We’re going to the unfinished crypt under St. John the Divine for this one that includes a pre-show reception with wine and Via Carota cocktails.

Go if: you want to make your concert-going experience one to remember.

Randall Goosby & Zhu Wang

High School of Fashion Industries, Chelsea · Sat, May 2, 7:30pm

A few years back, I caught Randall Goosby’s Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and remember being immersed in his playing. His cadenza showed a maturity and lyricism where most would strive to impress. You can expect the same discernment in his chamber program with Zhu Wang on piano—a regular recital partner of Goosby’s, with a solo career running just as fast: Maria Canals first prize this past March, a 2024 New Orleans gold medal, and a 2021 Carnegie debut that landed on the New York Times’ Best of Classical list. They bring a special partnership to a program of Harry Burleigh’s Southland Sketches and Amy Beach’s Romance sitting next to Dvořák, Debussy, and Beethoven’s “Spring” Sonata.

Go if: you want to hear two rising stars take on a wide ranging program.

Erin Morley & Lawrence Brownlee: Golden Age

Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92NY, Upper East Side · Wed, May 6, 7:30pm

After hearing both Erin Morley and Lawrence Brownlee at the Met in separate productions, I can say they’re each the kind of singer you remember long after leaving the opera house. Morley’s voice sits right at the top of the soprano range without ever sounding strained and her leaps are a precise, athletic feat. Brownlee is the tenor people line up for when bel canto is on the calendar. His voice hits those punishing high Cs and Ds without falsetto and the harder the music gets the more he seems to enjoy it. Tonight they’re together with pianist Malcolm Martineau for a Golden Age program: Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi’s “Caro nome” from Rigoletto, the famous “Bell Song” from Lakmé, Bizet’s “Je crois entendre encore” from Pearl Fishers, and a few four-hand piano interludes (Morley plays too).

Go if: you want to hear two of the best bel canto singers share a stage.

Chen, Lipman & Cho Trio: Tradition. Transformed

Bohemian National Hall, Upper East Side · Thu, May 7, 7:30pm

This is what happens when three of the most-booked young American soloists clear an evening to play chamber music together. Violinist Stella Chen, violist Matthew Lipman, and cellist Brannon Cho take on a program that threads three centuries of trio writing: Mozart’s Divertimento in E-flat (his only string trio and one of his noblest works), Dohnányi’s five movement Serenade, and the New York premiere of Andreia Pinto Correia’s Cantares, drawing on Portuguese folk chant. Correia joins the players for an illustrated talk beforehand.

Go if: you want to catch three rising soloists performing some of the best trio works.

The Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble

St. Paul & St. Andrew United Methodist Church, Upper West Side · Sun, May 10, 4pm · Free

Sunday afternoon, free, in a church big enough to give the strings some room to breathe. When the Met Orchestra musicians aren’t backing operas at their Lincoln Center home, some of them spin off to perform chamber music all around the city. This performance includes Valerie Coleman’s Maombi Asante (a wind piece whose title is Swahili for “thank you”), Gabriela Lena Frank’s Mitos for wind quintet (worth catching the same week as her opera, listed here too), and Dvořák’s “American” String Quintet, which he wrote during his Iowa summer in 1893, far from New York and homesick for Bohemia.

Go if: you want a Sunday afternoon of top tier classical without the top tier price.

Parker Quartet & Nicholas Phan

Advent Lutheran Church, Upper West Side · Mon, May 11, 7:30pm · Free with registration

The Parker Quartet—one of my favorite ensembles for their intensity and richness—comes to Music Mondays for an all-Schubert program anchored by the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, one of Schubert’s most gripping works. The night opens with tenor Nicholas Phan singing Die schöne Müllerin, the song cycle about a young miller's descent from infatuation into heartbreak. He then performs the standalone Schubert lied Der Tod und das Mädchen—the source material that the quartet's slow movement is built on—before the Parker takes the stage.

Go if: a Monday night of Schubert and heartbreak sounds like exactly your thing.

Jonathan Biss: Piano Dialogues - Words Fail

Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center, Upper West Side · Tue, May 12, 7:30pm

Watching Jonathan Biss perform takes you well past being impressed and into something more absorbing. You get the sense the piece is so deeply internalized that it pours out of him physically—you can see it in the way his body moves with the score as the piece takes shape in front of you note by note.

Watching Biss perform fifteen feet away in a crypt last year was that kind of experience and I’d bet on a similar outcome for this program about what words can’t say. Mendelssohn, Janáček, and Kurtág all show up in small scale pieces, building towards Schumann’s Fantasie in C—a love letter to his wife Clara so personal you feel like it wasn’t meant for your ears.

Go if: you want to hear one of today’s most thoughtful pianists.

Imani Winds: The French Connection

Miller Theatre, Morningside Heights · Mon, May 18, 6pm · Free

Imani Winds moves and plays as a single unit. Five wind players whose tones blur together building this rich tapestry of sound, hard for any wind quintet to achieve. They won a Grammy in 2024, and program music at the intersection of art and justice. Tonight’s program features composers influenced by French culture, jazz, and folk traditions. Valerie Coleman’s Portraits of Josephine Baker, Lalo Schifrin (yes, the Mission: Impossible guy) and his New Orleans suite, and Henri Tomasi’s Sacred and Profane Dances. Pop-ups at Miller put the audience onstage with the players, drink in hand, and you can hang around with the artists after.

Go if: you want to hear one of the best wind quintets out there.

Aeolus Quartet

GatherNYC @ Museum of Arts and Design, Columbus Circle · Sun, May 24, 11am

Aeolus has been playing together long enough to have worked out the kind of instinctive communication you can’t fake. They’ve spent years championing American composers who don’t get enough airtime, releasing two albums under their Many-Sided Music project dedicated to that cause. This program fits the bill: a Bach chorale next to Andrea Casarrubios’s Overture and Chorale inspired by it, Jessie Montgomery’s Strum, Bacewicz’s Third Quartet from postwar Poland, and the slow movement of Florence Price’s G Major Quartet, which pulls from Black spirituals. An hour of music, Sunday morning, coffee included.

Go if: you think mornings are the best time to hear chamber music.

Orchestral

Full symphony concerts, chamber orchestras, and large ensemble programs.

Canticle of the Sun: Beth Willer

Church of the Ascension, Greenwich Village · Thu, May 21, 7:30pm

Voices of Ascension Chorus and Orchestra has built a reputation for its refined sound and thoughtful pairings of choral landmarks with adventurous new works. Their season finale, guest conducted by Beth Willer, centers on the New York premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Canticle of the Sun, which sets a hymn by St. Francis of Assisi for chorus, cello, and percussion. It asks a lot of its solo cellist, Tommy Mesa: detuning, climbing the instrument’s highest register, and at one point abandoning the cello completely for a bass drum and flexatone.

Pulitzer winner Ellen Reid’s Oscillations: 100 Years and Forever gets its East Coast premiere with new NYC visuals and two works by Olivier Messiaen bring the organ and chorus into the same mystical orbit.

Go if: you’re into sacred music with a sense of adventure.

The Philadelphia Orchestra with Marin Alsop & Wynton Marsalis

Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Fri, May 29, 8pm

Marin Alsop’s chemistry with the Philadelphia Orchestra at their March concert left a lasting impression, which is why I’m bullish on their return to Carnegie. Beethoven’s Seventh is one of my favorite symphonies—propulsive, intense, and with the famous second movement that builds from a whisper to a full on orchestral procession you can’t get out of your head. On second half, Alsop conducts the New York premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Symphony No. 5, “Liberty,” a commission for America’s 250th written for a jazz big band and orchestra with Marsalis himself on trumpet.

Go if: you want to hear two legends taking on heavyweight pieces.

Opera & Staged Works

Opera classics, new productions, intimate stagings, and anything that tells a story through music and bodies in space.

Heartbeat Opera’s Vanessa

Baruch Performing Arts Center, Kips Bay · May 12-31

Heartbeat Opera strips operas down to a chamber group and a handful of singers, staged close enough to put you right in front of the drama. Their Manon! at Irondale this past February was opera like I’d never experienced and I want to keep it that way.

Vanessa won composer Samuel Barber the 1958 Pulitzer, then fell out of fashion when serialism took over and dismissed it as too lush and willing to make you feel something. The plot is gothic and a little camp: a woman waits 20 years in a remote estate for her lover Anatol. He doesn’t return—his son does, also named Anatol, and the visit unravels everyone in the house. Heartbeat cuts the score to seven instruments, the cast to five, and the run time to 100 minutes.

Go if: you want your opera up close and personal.

You’re probably looking for more than just another season brochure. That’s what ODEA is for. We cover the concerts that don’t always get the glossy previews: string quartets in crypts, operas in downtown theaters, new music in old churches. The ones you usually hear about a week too late.

If that sounds like your thing, subscribe, share with a friend, or check out something unexpected. Have a concert to share? Reach out at odea@substack.com.

Subscribe now

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The best of last month

A few weeks ago, I was able to see a superb performance by pianist Víkingur Ólafsson at Carnegie Hall. His Bach, Schubert and Beethoven program all centered around the key of E major and E minor, played sequentially without applause until the very end, making it all the more absorbing. I appreciated his care for the melodic line in the Bach (Partita No. 6 in E Minor, BWV 830), treating it with its own sense of space and time, letting the line breathe naturally while the other voices fell into place around it. Ólafsson was thoughtful in defining the relationship between voices—sometimes working together in the same texture, sometimes at odds with completely different ideas in mind.

His Beethoven (Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109,) felt the most comfortable and expressive out of the program. He seemed to surrender to the slower variations of the third movement’s theme with his hunched over posture and head tucked in, nearly frozen, as if the music was pulling him inward. A departure from his mostly minimal upper body movements elsewhere. It felt introspective carving out space around the notes to perhaps hold a deeper meaning, especially coming out of the other variations’ dense, turbulent textures. It’s the kind of interpretation that makes you wonder more about how he or any pianist relates to this sonata or Beethoven’s music or something bigger. A satisfying resolution to the program’s E minor and E major tension, and it left me more curious about the person at the piano than when I sat down.

Looking ahead

April is a big month. Saariaho’s Innocence arrives at the Met, her final opera, about a school shooting’s aftermath with Joyce DiDonato leading the cast. It’s been performed around the world since 2021 but lands differently here.

Carnegie’s United in Sound: America at 250 festival continues with Kronos bringing Indigenous, Gullah-Geechee, and Chinese American histories to the Hall, and the Calder Quartet playing an all-American program that includes Florence Price, whose chamber music scores nearly didn’t make it.

Dover Quartet is back at Town Hall after a strong February showing at Carnegie. I'm curious about Shanghai Quartet at Alice Tully, two brothers who formed a quartet in 1983 when chamber music in China barely existed, still playing together forty years later. Poiesis Quartet comes to Kaufman Music Center having swept Banff and Fischoff while programming four living composers in their finals. Sō Percussion makes a splash at Queens College and Sandbox Percussion and Metropolis Ensemble bring the dreamy minimalism of Canto Ostinato to The New School.

Here’s what’s worth hearing this month.

The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

Kaija Saariaho: Innocence

Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center · Apr 6–29 (7 performances)

Once I saw the doll house-esque set design I couldn’t get it out of my head. A classroom, restaurant kitchen, and wedding reception fit together to create compressed visual tension. I’d like to think it reflects the way the late Kaija Saariaho's final opera forces you to hold multiple truths together in your head.

Innocence begins at a wedding reception in Helsinki where the groom’s older brother carried out a school shooting a decade earlier. When a last-minute replacement waitress shows up and recognizes the family, her daughter was one of the dead, the opera becomes a slow burn thriller about complicity and grief.

Saariaho wrote Innocence in nine languages mixing traditional opera singers with musical actors and folk vocalists. Joyce DiDonato sings the grieving mother, Susanna Mälkki conducts, and Simon Stone’s original staging makes the trip from Aix-en-Provence.

Go if: you want to experience the most important new opera of the decade.

Poiesis Quartet

Kaufman Music Center, Upper West Side · Fri, Apr 10, 7:30pm

Sweeping Banff, Fischoff, and St. Paul in two years while programming four living composers in their finals, including a world premiere, is a remarkable feat. Atypical of other quartets that tend to gravitate to the familiarity of canonical works. When I saw they’re coming to NYC (twice this month!), I knew this had to be a top recommendation.

Pianist Amiri Harewood joins them, a Concert Artists Guild competition winner on his North American debut tour. The program is built around Gabriela Lena Frank’s Tres Homenajes, a piano quintet exploring Latin American camaraderie through Peruvian and Bolivian rhythms. It moves from an aggressive scherzo to an extended slow movement inspired by an island in Lake Titicaca. Poiesis performs Jerod Tate’s Pisachi, six sections drawing on Hopi and Pueblo music, and Brian Nabors’ String Quartet, which he says contains “heart and grit, capturing my love for lyricism, harmony and more thorny techniques.” Harewood pairs Shostakovich and Bach Preludes and Fugues. Don’t miss Poiesis’s other concert happening later in the month at Museum of Arts and Design.

Program:

• Gabriela Lena Frank — Tres Homenajes, 1. Scherzo para Sipan

• Shostakovich — Prelude and Fugues Op. 87, No. 7 in A Major

• J.S. Bach — The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2: Prelude and Fugue No. 19 in A Major, BWV 888

• Brian Nabors — String Quartet

• Gabriela Lena Frank — Tres Homenajes, 2. Adagio para Amantani

• Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate — Pisachi

• J.S. Bach — The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2: Prelude and Fugue No. 24 in B Minor, BWV 893

• Shostakovich — Prelude and Fugues Op. 87, No. 6 in B Minor

• Gabriela Lena Frank — Tres Homenajes, 3. T’inku

Go if: you want to hear the quartet that proved you can win everything without playing it safe.

Solo and Chamber Music

Smaller forces, tightly curated programs.

NY Phil Ensembles at Merkin Hall

Merkin Hall, Upper West Side · Sun, Apr 12, 3pm

The New York Philharmonic’s chamber music series at Merkin is one of the best deals in the city for a third of what you’d pay at David Geffen Hall. Dvořák’s Ninth Quartet is melancholic from start to finish, written in twelve days and dedicated to Brahms for getting his music published. Schumann’s Märchenerzählungen (Fairy Tales) for clarinet, viola, and piano came in his final weeks before entering an asylum—four miniatures whose stories he never explained. Brahms’s Second Trio has the piano playing in two while the strings play in three, cross-rhythms layered throughout.

Program:

• Dvořák – String Quartet No. 9

• R. Schumann – Märchenerzählungen (Fairy Tales)

• Brahms – Piano Trio No. 2

Go if: you want to see the Philharmonic up close and personal.

Dover Quartet

Town Hall, Midtown · Sun, Apr 19, 2pm

After seeing Dover’s masterful performance back in February at Carnegie, their return to NYC is an easy rec. This program at Town Hall opens with early Schubert, a young composer finding his voice in the quartet form. Then Grażyna Bacewicz’s Quartet No. 4, written in 1951 for the Underground Union of Musicians that kept music alive during the war in Poland. It won first prize at Liège and became a required piece for the Geneva quartet competition. The finale uses the oberek, a Polish leaping dance, and builds to what one writer called “a conclusion of symphonic proportions.”

After intermission, Mendelssohn’s Quartet No. 6 in F minor, Op. 80, which he wrote right after his sister Fanny died from a stroke in May 1847. He called it “Requiem for Fanny,” finished it by September, and died himself two months later at age 38, making this his last major work.

Program:

• Schubert — Quartet No. 11 in E major, D. 353

• Grazyna Bacewicz — Quartet No. 4

• Mendelssohn — Quartet No. 6 in F minor, Op. 80

Go if: you want to hear one of the great quartets of our time.

The Shanghai Quartet

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Sun, Apr 19, 5pm

Brothers Weigang and Honggang Li were born in 1960s Shanghai where they learned violin during a time when Western music and literature was outlawed and their family was under surveillance. As restrictions eased, they attended Shangai Conservatory of Music and formed a quartet with two classmates in 1983 when chamber music in China barely existed. They won second prize at a competition in England a year later, and have kept the group together ever since with several personnel changes over the year.

Their performance tackles Haydn's "Rider" Quartet from his London period, Tan Dun mixing Chinese poetry with Western forms, Gershwin's Lullaby written as a composition exercise at 21, Dvořák's "American" Quartet sketched while homesick in Iowa. The quartet has been playing these pieces for decades, but approach the music with a fresh perspective, listening to old recordings and finding new ways to improve.

Program:

• Haydn — Quartet in G minor for Strings, Hob. III:74, No. 3, “The Rider”

• Tan Dun — Feng Ya Song (String Quartet No. 1)

• Gershwin — Lullaby for String Quartet

• Dvořák — Quartet in F major for Strings, Op. 96, “American”

Go if: you want a quartet that’s actually lived the story they’re telling.

Riverside Brass Quintet: In Bloom

Tenri Cultural Institute, Greenwich Village · Sun, Apr 12, 6pm

Riverside Brass Quintet has an impressively rich sound, the kind where you hear the quintet first and individuals second. They play with control throughout the dynamic range without losing presence, which means they’ll fit their sound nicely into the intimate space of Tenri.

They start off with David Biedenbender’s Nautilus, a movement from his Sacred Geometry suite inspired by Gaudí’s Sagrada Família. The piece builds on a small phrase that develops into longer harmonic progressions, mimicking how a nautilus shell grows outward in a logarithmic spiral. Shanyse Strickland’s Colors pulls from jazz and disco. She calls her work “Classical-Pop,” mixing R&B and contemporary classical. Bass trombonist Declan Wilcox arranged Chick Corea’s Children’s Songs for brass and hornist Liana Hoffman arranged Amy Beach’s Pastorale from 1941. Dana Wilson’s Daylight at Midnight closes with his blend of minimalism and jazz. Reception after with light refreshments.

Program:

• Alan Civil — Dance Suite (1990)

• Chick Corea arr. Declan Wilcox — Children’s Songs (1984)

• Shanyse Strickland — Colors (2023)

• David Biedenbender — Nautilus from Sacred Geometry (2022)

• Amy Beach arr. Liana Hoffman — ˆPastorale (1941)

• Dana Wilson — Daylight at Midnight (2005)

Go if: you want to hear a top notch brass quartet explore contemporary works.

Parker Quartet & Fleur Barron: Ecopoetics, Nature, Heritage

National Sawdust, Williamsburg · Sat, Apr 25, 7:30pm

Anthony Cheung takes poems by Arthur Sze and Victoria Chang and builds a new piece out of them, for string quartet and mezzo-soprano. Both write about the natural world in their own unique way with Sze making you feel small inside it while Chang makes you feel like it's watching you. The Parker Quartet commissioned this piece, so by the time they play it at National Sawdust they'll have been living with it for over a year. They’re joined by Fleur Barron, a Singaporean-British mezzo with a warm voice that’ll help bring color and character to the poetry.

Go if: you’ve ever wondered what it feels like when a string quartet plays a poem.

Carnegie Hall Presents: Kronos Quartet — Three Bones

Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Sat, Apr 25, 7:30pm

Kronos Quartet lives in a different world than the quartets who built their careers on Beethoven and Brahms cycles. They’ve commissioned over 1,000 new works since 1973, championing new voices and pushing the boundaries of what four string instruments can do. Their program Three Bones is a semi-staged triptych exploring Indigenous, Gullah-Geechee, and Chinese American histories as part of Carnegie’s United in Sound: America at 250 festival. Electric Apache violinist Laura Ortman opens, followed by Charlton Singleton’s Amelia’s Song featuring Grammy-winning percussionist Quentin E. Baxter, then pipa virtuoso Wu Man closes with new music by Dai Wei and personal histories of Chinese Americans who fought for civil rights in San Francisco. A big night of music that gets left out of American history.

Go if: you’re curious what Indigenous, Gullah-Geechee, and Chinese American histories sound like coming through one of the best string quartets.

Borromeo Quartet & Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

Advent Lutheran Church, Upper West Side · Mon, Apr 27, 7:30pm · Free with registration

Violinist Nicholas Kitchen has spent years finding markings in Beethoven's manuscripts that never made it into the published scores. That level of score study is just how Borromeo operates. The quartet performs from full four-part scores rather than individual parts, so everyone is always reading the whole piece at once. Tonight they play Kitchen’s arrangements of Bach and Shostakovich preludes and fugues alongside Stravinsky, Caroline Shaw, and Vijay Iyer, with legendary pianist Anne-Marie McDermott joining for Schumann’s Piano Quintet. It’s free with registration, which means the seats go fast, so get there early.

Program:

• J.S. Bach, arr. N. Kitchen — Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp minor, BWV 849

• Shostakovich, arr. N. Kitchen — Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Major, Op. 87

• Stravinsky — Three Pieces

• Caroline Shaw — Entr’acte

• Vijay Iyer — Dig the Say

• Schumann — Piano Quintet, Op. 44

Go if: you’ve never heard a quartet that reads music this closely.

Cutting Edge Concerts: Margaret in Love and War

Leonard Nimoy Thalia, Symphony Space, Upper West Side · Tue, Apr 28, 7:30pm

Laura Schwendinger writes operas about women whose art was shaped by violence. Her previous opera Artemisia was about Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who went on to make some of the most powerful work of her era. Now she turns to Margaret Fuller, the first female foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune, who covered the Italian revolution from the front lines in 1847, fell in love with a young revolutionary, had a child, and died with both of them in a shipwreck off Fire Island—her manuscript history of the revolution lost at sea. Marnie Breckenridge sings the title role, Chris Alden directs, and conductor Eiki Isomura leads the chamber ensemble.

Go if: a journalist who died with her revolution unfinished seems like exactly the right subject for an opera.

Mozart’s String Quartets with Escher String Quartet and Brandon Patrick George, flute

Morgan Library & Museum, Gilder Lehrman Hall, Murray Hill · Wed, Apr 29, 7pm

The Escher String Quartet celebrates the Morgan’s Mozart exhibition with a program of quartets from his mature period — written after Mozart quit his court job in Salzburg, moved to Vienna, and started pushing the music somewhere his audiences didn't always follow. The quartet’s name comes from M.C. Escher’s method of combining individual parts into a whole—four distinct voices that come together without losing the unique character of each one. Flutist Brandon Patrick George, a Grammy winner with Imani Winds, joins for Mozart’s Flute Quartet in D Major. Get there early to catch the exhibition before the concert.

All Mozart program:

• String Quartet in E-flat Major, K. 428

• Flute Quartet No. 1 in D Major, K. 285

• String Quartet in B-flat Major, K. 458 “The Hunt”

Go if: you want to see and hear Mozart’s manuscripts.

Calder Quartet

Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Thu, Apr 30, 7:30pm

The Calder Quartet plays contemporary music with a conviction that most quartets reserve for the canon. Their Carnegie Hall debut is an all-American program that includes Philip Glass’s minimalist “Company” quartet, Ben Johnston’s microtonal “Amazing Grace” (tuned to just intonation, which makes the hymn sound more like itself than you've ever heard it), Samuel Barber’s String Quartet with the Adagio everyone’s heard in a movie, Andrew Norman’s Sabina arranged for quartet, and Florence Price’s Second Quartet to close. As the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra, her chamber music nearly didn’t survive, found in an abandoned house in 2009, making you wonder how close we’ve come to losing such history. After the concert, join Calder for a drink in the Jacobs Room.

Program:

• Glass — String Quartet No. 2, “Company”

• Johnston — String Quartet No. 4, “Amazing Grace”

• Barber — String Quartet

• Andrew Norman — Sabina (arr. for string quartet)

• Price — String Quartet No. 2

Go if: you want American music played like it matters as much as the European canon.

Experimental/Immersive

Cross-genre work, unusual spaces, and concerts that upend expectations.

Matthew Evan Taylor, James Brandon Lewis & Lesley Mok

One Rivington, Lower East Side · Mon, Apr 6, 7-8pm · Pay-what-you-wish

Matthew Evan Taylor writes music where the structure comes from breath. His AfroPneumaism practice asks musicians to be silent on the inhale and make sound on the exhale, so the ensemble moves at the pace of breathing instead of strict time. Tonight he premieres Breath-songs & Lullabies, a 30 minute piece celebrating the birth of his son that includes a lullaby and asks the audience to breathe with the performers. Taylor plays alto sax, clarinet, and flutes through a loop station, building layers of wind sound with tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and percussionist Lesley Mok. The evening opens with an improvised set before the premiere. This happens in Metropolis Ensemble’s small incubator space on Rivington Street, fitting for a piece where breathing is part of the music.

Go if: you want to hear how joy and grief can be part of the same breath.

Metropolis Ensemble, Erik Hall, and Sandbox Percussion: Canto Ostinato

Tishman Auditorium, The New School · Wed, Apr 8, 7:30pm

If you were to take a piece typically scored for two or four pianos and expand it across mallet instruments, woodwinds, strings, and a concert grand, this is the result of that experiment. In Simeon ten Holt’s minimalist masterpiece Canto Ostinato, performers take the wheel, deciding how long sections last, when to move on, and which instruments play what. Most performances run about 90 minutes while some stretch past four hours. Metropolis Ensemble, Erik Hall, and Sandbox Percussion built their own version of it, premiered it at Brooklyn Botanic Garden for over 3,000 people at sunrise and sunset, and released a studio recording this month.

Go if: you want to know what happens when minimalism becomes a group experiment.

Vicky Chow & Mivos Quartet: Morton Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet

Roulette, Boerum Hill · Wed, Apr 8, 8pm

Ninety minutes of Morton Feldman. You may wonder what does that even sound like? Or who is Morton Feldman? He was a downtown New York composer, one of the most significant of the 20th century, known for extremely long and quiet pieces that mess with your sense of time and memory.

David Harrington who premiered the piece with Kronos Quartet describes it feeling like “warm, slow, beautiful drops of water over a long period of time.” Steve Reich called it “the most beautiful work I know.” Elvis Costello said it’s the best music for 4 a.m.

Piano and String Quartet was one of Feldman’s final pieces before he died in 1987, and it barely rises above a a sotto voce for the entire 90 minutes. Tiny harmonic shifts, arpeggios on the piano, brief chords from the quartet. When you listen to it, the complexity is all in your head. Pianist Vicky Chow from Bang on a Can teams up with the Mivos Quartet for contemporary music that requires next level stamina.

Go if: you want to get lost in minimalist sound world.

Sō Percussion Unplugged

LeFrak Concert Hall, Queens College, Flushing · Fri, Apr 17, 8pm

One five-octave marimba, four tables with small objects, a few drums, flower pots, hand-held metal pipes, household items, and a friction drum called the lion’s roar. That’s the setup for Sō Percussion to blow away everyone’s expectations of percussion performance—something they’ve been doing for the past 25 years.

Their program features works by Caroline Shaw, John Cage, and Vijay Iyer, pulling from deep knowledge of rhythms from West Africa, Trinidad, India, and North America. When you watch them play a marimba with fingertips and thimbles or turn flower pots into instruments, you'll see why they achieve a level of synchronicity most chamber groups never reach.

Go if: you want a night of top tier percussion works.

Musical Memoir

YIVO Institute, Chelsea · Thu, Apr 23, 7:30pm

Two composers, two grandmothers, two ways of preserving memories. Alex Weiser recorded his grandmother Irene talking about 1930s Coney Island before she died in 2021, transcribed her words verbatim and set them to music. Eric Chasalow, who has spent his career combining acoustic instruments with electronic sound and archival materials, found stories his grandmother Muriel wrote in her eighties and turn it into music that ranges from Baroque to disco. Both composers make it so that you can hear the person as if they’re right there, their voice, inflection, storytelling. The adventurous Talea Ensemble helps bring these memories to life with mezzo-sopranos Sharon Harms and Annie Rosen.

Go if: you want to hear what happens when composers treat their grandmothers’ words as primary source material.

Composer Portraits: Hannah Kendall

Miller Theatre, Morningside Heights · Thu, Apr 23, 7:30pm

Hannah Kendall uses combs to pluck strings, dreadlock cuffs to prepare violins, and music boxes amplified by snare drums. She’s a British composer who studied at Columbia with Georg Friedrich Haas and George E. Lewis. She describes her work as trying to “creolize” sound within orchestral settings, bringing Afro-diasporic traditions alongside European classical forms. When you listen to her pieces the dynamics are polarizing and the details are intricate enough that you catch new things on repeat listens. The International Contemporary Ensemble performs several recent pieces, including the U.S. premiere of building a burning house.

Program:

• building a burning house (2026) U.S. Premiere co-commissioned by Crash Ensemble, Barbican Centre, Ensemble Musikfabrik, and Miller Theatre at Columbia University

• when flesh is pressed against the dark (2024)

• Even sweetness can scratch the throat (2023)

• Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2. (2021)

Go if: you want to hear a composer building her own vocabulary from scratch.

Pigeonwing Dance and Neave Trio: Rising

Baruch Performing Arts Center, Kips Bay · Thu–Sat, Apr 23–25, 7pm

Sometimes the feeling from dance and music, the abstraction of an overwhelming topic like climate change, can influence your perspective in ways that facts and data can’t. Rising attempts to do that as a collaboration between Pigeonwing Dance and the Neave Trio about our connection to the ocean and what happens when sea levels rise. The score includes recorded text from oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer and naturalist Craig Foster from the documentary My Octopus Teacher. Composer Robert Sirota wrote the music, Gabrielle Lamb choreographed the dances, and they spent three years developing it with both groups to shape the final work.

Go if: you want to see whether dance and chamber music can say something about climate that words can’t.

BlackBox Ensemble Presents: WordPlay

The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Midtown · Sat, Apr 25, 8pm

The adventurous BlackBox Ensemble designed a program around the idea that instruments can become extensions of speech. In Andile Khumalo’s Shades of Words, a narrator’s reading of poetry blends with the ensemble as they reflect the rhythms of language. Elliott Carter’s A Mirror on Which to Dwell sets Elizabeth Bishop poems for soprano and chamber orchestra, building worlds from her precise, photographic language that often carries a deeper meaning.

Rising composer Paul Novak premiers when i was nine and a diagnosis, both exploring memory and psychosomatic illness. Unsuk Chin’s Akrostichon-Wortspiel closes the night with seven scenes from The Endless Story and Alice through the Looking Glass. Consonants and vowels get scrambled, words are read backwards, and the soprano navigates microtonal landscapes through seven emotional states from bright to grotesque.

Program:

• Andile Khumalo, Shades of Words (2011)

• Elliott Carter, A Mirror On Which to Dwell (1975)

• Paul Novak, when i was nine (2025)

• Paul Novak, a diagnosis (2024/25)

• Unsuk Chin, Akrostichon-Wortspiel (1991, rev. 1993)

Go if: you want to hear sound worlds built by some of the most compelling contemporary composers.

Opera & Staged Works

Opera classics, new productions, intimate stagings, and anything that tells a story through music and bodies in space.

MSM Opera Theatre: Dark Sisters

Manhattan School of Music · Thu–Sat, Apr 16–18, 7:30pm; Sun, Apr 19, 2pm

Nico Muhly and playwright Stephen Karam wrote an opera about the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the polygamist sect that split from mainstream Mormonism in the early 1900s and made headlines after a 2008 Texas ranch raid. Dark Sisters follows one woman trying to escape, but the real story is the complicated dance between all the sister wives and the single patriarch who controls everything.

Muhly wrote music for each wife based on where she is psychologically. The believer, the grief-stricken one, the teenager whose hymns develop into something harsher. Manhattan School of Music’s Opera Theatre stages it with conductor Rakefet Hak and director Janine Morita Colletti.

Go if: you want to hear about polygamy from the sister wives’ side.

You’re probably looking for more than just another season brochure. That’s what ODEA is for. We cover the concerts that don’t always get the glossy previews: string quartets in crypts, operas in downtown theaters, new music in old churches. The ones you usually hear about a week too late.

If that sounds like your thing, subscribe, share with a friend, or check out something unexpected. Have a concert to share? Reach out at odea@substack.com.

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March in New York is a month of deception. You leave your apartment in a winter coat ready to take on the cold, and by the afternoon it’s slung over your arm, the sun’s warmth making you believe spring is finally here. Then you wake up the next day and the city has changed its mind. Back to February. Of course.

This month's concerts seem to understand what it means to move forward when the path ahead isn't clear. What makes them compelling is the conviction the composers and performers bring—they navigate the unknown with the faith needed to push through anyway.

The three day Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival captures what Ukrainian composers do with grief, reckoning, and persistence. The music holds out hope while the war continues, refusing to let uncertainty silence what needs to be heard.

The Refugee Orchestra Project brings together composers forced to leave their homelands, led by Lidiya Yankovskaya, who founded it after realizing most people didn’t know she came to the United States as a refugee herself. At Carnegie Hall, the American Composers Orchestra stages five world premieres as open letters to America, and Emmy-winning composer Jeff Beal plays piano in a crypt beneath a church, processing what it means to live with multiple sclerosis.

Even the big Carnegie nights lean into this tension. Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson commits his entire recital to E major and E minor, exploring the emotional distance between parallel keys across Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert.

Here are the concerts that make the effort worthwhile.

The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

Takács Quartet

Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Wed, Mar 4, 7:30pm

The Takács Quartet has a way of collapsing the distance between stage and audience, so you can pick up on their nuances that separate them from many other quartets. The way an inner line emerges and is emphasized, the way a cadence is held back for a split second, the way a gesture passes from player to player. It’s a hyper-aware level of playing few quartets ever achieve.

That matters in a program like this, which showcases different musical languages. Haydn’s “Rider” Quartet, for all its gusto, is a piece of quick decisions, a negotiation of forward motion and restraint. Clarice Assad’s NEXUS, heard here in its New York premiere and written for Takács, explores the tension between individual voices and collective expression. Debussy’s lone String Quartet closes the night with colors that keep deepening until the whole thing feels orchestral.

Program:

• Haydn — String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 74, No. 3, “Rider”

• Clarice Assad — NEXUS (NY Premiere, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall)

• Debussy — String Quartet

Go if: you want to hear a top tier quartet and find out what makes them tick.

Aspect Chamber Music Series: Pavel Haas Quartet

Bohemian National Hall, Upper East Side · Thu, Mar 12, 7:30pm

The Pavel Haas Quartet goes for conviction first. The Prague-based quartet has collected five Gramophone Awards, but what separates them is temperament. Their playing can be ferocious and a little raw around the edges, and that’s part of the point.

The program is resolutely Czech. Kaprálová’s First radiates self-assurance, written at 20 during a summer holiday in the Czech-Moravian Highlands—worry-free, immediate music composed before her death at 25 in 1940. Martinů’s Fifth, often labeled too modernist, favors sharp profiles and volatile rhetoric, composed while in exile. Dvořák’s Fourteenth is late-period work, completed in Prague as a joyful homecoming after his years in New York—buoyant on the surface but with darker turns underneath.

The quartet takes its name from Czech-Jewish composer Pavel Haas, imprisoned at Theresienstadt in 1941 and murdered at Auschwitz three years later. The quartet inherited more than just a name, they play this music with the urgency it demands.

Program:

• Kaprálová — String Quartet No. 1, Op. 8

• Martinů — String Quartet No. 5, H. 268

• Dvořák — String Quartet No. 14 in A-flat Major, Op. 105

Go if: you want Czech quartets played hot, fast, and on the edge.

Víkingur Ólafsson, piano

Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Tue, Mar 24, 8pm

You can usually tell within the first minute if a pianist is going to play at you or with you. Ólafsson tends to do the second. In doing so, he makes Stern Auditorium feel smaller than it is. Calm at the keyboard, almost clinical in his control of pacing and color. The effect is intimate like he’s guiding your attention with a light touch.

The program lives in E major and E minor. Bach’s short E major prelude opens the evening, then his Partita No. 6 drops into E minor. This is where Ólafsson’s interpretive instincts come into view. Repeated phrases avoid the same treatment; he’ll shift weight mid-phrase, bring the bass into sharper focus, or let a hidden melodic line flicker into view before burying it again in the harmonic texture. The structure stays intact but the interpretation is renewed.

Beethoven’s E minor Sonata, Op. 90 keeps things taut. First movement compact and impatient, the second loosening into song. Schubert’s E minor Sonata, D. 566 is the elusive one, fragmented with phrases that feel like they’re about to resolve and then drift elsewhere. Beethoven’s E major Sonata, Op. 109 closes the night, moving from E major into stormy E minor, then returning to E major for a theme and variations that capture the evening’s essence.

Program:

• J.S. Bach — Prelude No. 9 in E Major, BWV 854

• Beethoven — Piano Sonata No. 27 in E Minor, Op. 90

• J.S. Bach Partita No. 6 in E Minor, BWV 830

• Schubert — Piano Sonata in E Minor, D. 566

• Beethoven — Piano Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109

Go if: you want a recital that pulls you close and holds you there.

Solo and Chamber Music

Smaller forces, tightly curated programs.

Dalí Quartet with Ricardo Morales, clarinet

The Rockefeller University, Upper East Side · Mon, Mar 2, 7:30pm

The Dalí Quartet treats Latin American repertoire like it belongs on the same shelf as Haydn and Brahms, and plays it with the same authority. Chamber Music America named them 2024 Ensemble of the Year, and their programming favors imagination and rich color. Ricardo Morales, principal clarinet of the Philadelphia Orchestra, joins them for a program that hasn’t been announced yet. Sometimes that’s reason enough to go.

Go if: you’re looking for a top notch performance of Latin American repertoire.

JACK Quartet

Buttenwieser Hall, 92NY, Upper East Side · Fri, Mar 20, 7:30pm

Few quartets have both the technical ability and artistry to handle new work with strings and electronics, but JACK Quartet does. The program comes entirely from JACK Studio, the quartet’s incubator for finding composers before the wider classical world takes notice.

Tristan Perich’s Oblique, a world premiere, pairs the quartet with 1-bit sound, audio made from the simplest digital signal: on/off pulses. Those sounds are processed through custom circuitry Perich builds himself. Keir GoGwilt’s Treatise on Limited Freedoms: Future Mode 1 gets its New York premiere, followed by world premieres from Jules Reidy and Ailie Ormston. What separates JACK from other capable new music groups is how they find the beauty in what could otherwise feel like technical exercises.

Program:

• Tristan Perich — Oblique for string quartet and electronics (world premiere; 92NY co-commission)

• Keir GoGwilt — Treatise on Limited Freedoms: Future Mode 1 (NY premiere)

• Jules Reidy — Shadow Symmetric (world premiere)

• Ailie Ormston — New Paintings (world premiere)

Go if: you want to catch composers worth knowing before everyone else does.

Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival: Places

DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Midtown · Thu, Mar 19, 7:30pm

There’s a persistence in Ukrainian music that mirrors the persistence of the Ukrainian people. The Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival has spent years making that audible, staging work by composers shaped by place, history, and the pressures of power. As one of three festival performances, Places treats geography as composition, mapping terrain through sound.

International Contemporary Ensemble performs five works (four U.S. premieres plus a new arrangement). Alla Zahaykevych’s Vela Invicti reimagines Odysseus’s sea journeys across the Black Sea and incorporates a sonogram recording of the Black Sea waters. Ostap Manulyak’s Branching II follows, then Viktor Kaminsky’s Voice of the Mountains. Anna Korsun’s Terricone starts with a scream from every player in the ensemble. Born in Donbas, Korsun named the piece after the slag heaps of the mining industry, a physical record of extraction impacting the surrounding environment. Ivan Nebesnyy’s Five Minutes After Leaving the Bomb Shelter closes the night. The festival continues its work of making Ukrainian music heard on its own terms.

Program:

• Alla Zahaykevych — Vela Invecti

• Ostap Manulyak — Branching II

• Viktor Kaminsky — Voice of the Mountains

• Anna Korsun — Terricone

• Ivan Nebesnyy — Five Minutes After Leaving the Bomb Shelter

Go if: you want music that holds its ground while everything around it shifts.

Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival: Practices

The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Midtown · Sat, Mar 21, 7:30pm

The string quartet has long been a reflection for what a culture values musically. The Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival closes with Practices, tracing a century of Ukrainian composers using four strings to navigate experimentation, reflection, and spirituality.

The Rhythm Method opens with Stefania Turkevych’s String Quartet No. 1. Turkevych was Ukraine’s first female symphonic composer and her quartet carries the weight of pioneering work written under conditions that didn’t encourage women to compose. The program moves through Myroslav Skoryk’s String Quartet No. 2, Boris Loginov’s sleep during insomnia, and Ihor Zavhorodnii’s Music That Leaves Itself. Valentyn Sylvestrov’s Icon provides stillness before Hanna Havrylets’s For Maria closes the night.

Program:

• Turkevych’s — String Quartet No. 1

• Zahaykevych — String Quartet No. 2,

• Loginov — sleep during insomnia,

• Zavhorodnii — Music That Leaves Itself,

• Valentyn Sylvestrov — Icon

• Hanna Havrylets — For Maria

Go if: you want to hear how a century of Ukrainian composers have used the string quartet to process everything from grief to transcendence.

Viano Quartet

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Sun, Mar 22, 5pm

The Viano Quartet is riding the momentum of being last year’s Avery Fisher Career Grant recipients. What stayed with me from their July performance at Alice Tully was how cleanly they shifted between repertoire. They’re Bowers Program Artists at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and this is their first full mainstage recital that goes the distance.

They start with Haydn’s genial String Quartet in D major, Op. 76, No. 5, then Mendelssohn’s effervescent Third Quartet. After intermission, we get the 20th century rep. Webern’s Langsamer Satz, a 1905 love letter slow movement that wears its late-Romantic heart on its sleeve. Then Shostakovich’s Ninth Quartet, five attacca movements that build into something symphonic. Listen in the third movement for his familiar wink at the “William Tell” gallop, dropped into the quartet’s jittery, jazz-esque energy.

Program:

• Haydn — Quartet in D major for Strings, Hob. III:79, Op. 76, No. 5

• Felix Mendelssohn — Quartet in D major for Strings, Op. 44, No. 1

• Anton Webern — Langsamer Satz for String Quartet

• Dmitri Shostakovich — Quartet No. 9 in E-flat major for Strings, Op. 117

Go if: you want to catch a young quartet that handles everything with equal conviction.

Cutting Edge Concerts: Miami comes to New York

Symphony Space, Upper West Side · Mon, Mar 23, 7:30pm

Miami’s new music ecosystem, flown up to the Upper West Side for the night. Pianist José López opens with a set built around CINTAS Fellowship composers of Cuban descent: de la Vega, Hernández Lizaso, Tania León, Orlando Jacinto García, and Ivette Herryman Rodriguez. After intermission, cellist Sarah Kim teams up with Alan Rafferty for contemporary works, closing with a world premiere from Victoria Bond, the festival’s founder. Some of the composers will be in the room and the onstage talk makes unfamiliar music click faster than the program notes ever could.

Go if: you want new music with the composers sitting a few rows away.

Death of Classical: Jeff Beal - New York Études, Vol. II (World Premiere)

The Crypt under The Church of the Intercession, Harlem · Thu-Fri, Mar 26-27, 6–8pm or 7:30–9:30pm

You start upstairs with a drink and hors d’oeuvres in the nave, then take a short walk past the cemetery, and end up underground in a 49-seat crypt for a solo piano world premiere. It’s the kind of sequence that makes you rethink the typical concert experience.

Five-time Emmy award winning composer Jeff Beal is playing New York Études, Vol. II, a set of quiet, reflective pieces shaped by living with multiple sclerosis. It reads like a late night notebook where he reflects on fatigue, persistence, the decision to stay. The crypt setting makes the theme of mortality and illness unavoidable and Beal turns the piano into a voice capable of confession.

Go if: you’re ready for a concert that operates more like a ritual than a recital.

Orchestral

Full symphony concerts, chamber orchestras, and large ensemble programs.

American Composers Orchestra: Hello, America: Letters to Us, from Us

Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Wed, Mar 11, 7:30pm

Five premieres, all commissioned as open letters to America. Under conductor Carolyn Kuan, the program reflects narratives around Black summer homes at the turn of the century, dreams, unspoken emotions, celebration rituals, and the patriotism of Black American women across generations.

Joseph C. Phillips Jr. opens with We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident, a title that carries its own weight before a note is played. Suzanne Kite follows with Wičhínčala Šakówin, then Shelley Washington’s Haymaker puts cellist Amanda Gookin in conversation with the full orchestra. Jessie Montgomery’s Procession (NY premiere) features percussionist Cynthia Yeh in what’s likely the most kinetic moment of the night. Brittany J. Green closes with Letters to America for soprano Karen Slack.

Program:

• Joseph C. Phillips Jr. — We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident (World Premiere, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall)

• Suzanne Kite — Wičhínčala Šakówin (World Premiere)

• Shelley Washington — Haymaker for Cello and Orchestra (World Premiere)

• Jessie Montgomery — Procession for Percussion and Orchestra (NY Premiere)

• Brittany J. Green — Letters to America for Soprano and Orchestra (World Premiere)

Go if: you want to hear composers address the country directly.

Refugee Orchestra Project: Imaginary Peace: Sounds of Migration

National Sawdust, Williamsburg · Fri, Mar 13, 7:30pm

Migration isn’t abstract when the composers on stage lived it. Conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya founded the Refugee Orchestra Project after realizing most people didn’t know she came to the United States as a refugee herself. The ensemble brings together musicians and composers who share that experience.

Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Two Suitcases opens with voice recordings of her Armenian parents, who arrived in the United States with two suitcases and an infant. Gabriela Ortiz’s Exilios follows with flutist Anna Urrey, then Wang Lu’s Tangram, Daniel Bernard Roumain’s Lift Every Voice, and Ljova Zhurbin’s Songs of Bert Myers featuring vocalist Inna Barmash. The evening closes with Zoltan Almashi’s Maria’s City, a tribute to Mariupol, Arson Fahim’s Journey to the Sea, and Milad Yousufi’s Imaginary Peace with soprano Zhanna Alkhazova.

Program:

• ‍Mary Kouyoumdjian — “Two Suitcases”‍

• Gabriela Ortiz — “Exilios”

• Wang Lu — “Waltz in July” and “Fiddle Tune”

• Daniel Bernard Roumain — “Lift Every Voice”

• Ljova — “Songs of Bert Myers” (selections)‍

• Arson Fahim — “Journey to the Sea”

• Zoltan Almashi — “Maria’s City”

• Milad Yousufi — “Imaginary Peace”

Go if: you want music that confronts displacement.

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra & Jeremy Denk, piano

Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92NY, Upper East Side · Sun, Mar 29, 2pm

Twenty-seven musicians without a conductor have to trust each other completely. Orpheus Chamber Orchestra teams up with renowned pianist Jeremy Denk joins them for Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, the one everyone skips for the later ones, but it’s got youthful swagger. Denk has a way of humanizing phrases, finding the emotional architecture beneath the technique. He talks about his right hand being “more agile, more Fred Astaire,” while his left “believes in patience and preparation.”

The program opens with Mahler’s lush arrangement of Beethoven’s “Serioso” string quartet, then a new orchestration of the “Pathétique” sonata by Sahun Samuel Hong, followed by the concerto. Orpheus has the chops to make all three land. Check out Denk’s Substack here.

Program:

• Beethoven — Allegretto from Piano Sonata No. 17 in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2, “The Tempest” (orch. Z. Wadsworth)

• Bethoven — Adagio molto e maestoso from String Quartet No. 7 in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1, “Razumovsky” (orch. J. Wilson)

• Beethoven — Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13, “Pathétique” (orch. S. Hong)

• Beethoven — Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15

Go if: you want to see musicians trust each other completely.

Experimental/Immersive

Cross-genre work, unusual spaces, and concerts that upend expectations.

Amy Williams, piano · Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories

Miller Theatre, Morningside Heights · Tue, Mar 3, 6pm · Free admission

Triadic Memories is 75 minutes of slowly evolving repetition that barely rises above pianissimo. Tiny harmonic changes, irregular chord patterns, and half-pedaling that pulls everything just slightly out of focus. It asks you to surrender to Morton Feldman’s glacial sense of time.

Pianist Amy Williams grew up hearing Feldman’s music in Buffalo during the heyday of the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. Three decades performing and recording his work means she knows exactly how to make every minute shift in color land. It’s part of Miller’s Pop-Up Concert series where you sit onstage, get a free drink, and talk to the pianist afterward.

Go if: you want 75 minutes where time slows down and your brain lets go.

International Contemporary Ensemble: The Shape of Forgetting

Roulette, Boerum Hill · Wed, Mar 11, 8pm

Memory doesn’t fade cleanly. It layers, distorts, and occasionally releases its grip without warning. Camila Agosto’s The Shape of Forgetting kicks off International Contemporary Ensemble’s triple-premiere night with a meditation on identity and the attachments we carry, incorporating original text that gets uncomfortably close to our deepest selves.

Lester St. Louis follows with emphatically non cypher, a trance-inspired sextet that translates electronic processes into acoustic settings. Multi-rhythmic layers and moving harmonic networks where subtle events briefly align before drifting apart, like life unfolding on multiple scales at once. The program also includes Paul Novak’s Broadcast Music, Inc. Award-winning seven dreams about my body, Erin Rogers’s Epiglot, and Shrish Jawadiwar’s Miniature.

Program:

• Lester St. Louis — emphatically non cypher (2026, World Premiere)

  Camila Agosto — The Shape of Forgetting (2026, World Premiere)

• Paul Novak — seven dreams about my body (2024)

• Erin Rogers — Epiglot (2026)

• Shrish Jawadiwar — Miniature (2022)

Go if: you’re curious how new music confronts memory.

Liminal: a string duo concert

Fou Gallery, Union Square · Sat, Mar 21, 7:30pm

There's a question buried in most gallery concerts: what's the relationship between the art on the walls and the music filling the room? Common Resonance is presenting Liminal, and watching how the answer unfolds might be the most interesting part of the night. A violin-cello duo plays nine new works written in direct response to Szelit Cheung’s paintings, whose whole thing is architecture-without-architecture: light, voids, suspended spaces, the feeling of stepping into a room that’s familiar yet new. The music leans into the same palette with lots of harmonics, delicate textures, and stillness. How the music and paintings work together is something you'll only figure out while you're there.

Go if: you want to see how art and music negotiate shared space.

Composer Portraits: Chinary Ung

Miller Theatre, Morningside Heights · Thu, Mar 26, 7:30pm

Chinary Ung survived the Khmer Rouge. That fact shapes everything he writes, but his music resists being reduced to trauma. The first American composer to win the Grawemeyer Award, Ung has spent six decades combining Cambodian folk traditions with contemporary classical techniques in ways that sound like neither pastiche nor preservation.

Miller’s portrait concert with the Del Sol String Quartet spans his career, from his 1966 String Trio (receiving its world premiere 60 years late) to a brand new commission, PREAH VIHEAR (Spiral XVI). The “Spiral” series has become Ung’s signature, each iteration circling back to similar material while moving outward into new territory. Tonight: Spiral III (1990), Spiral X: In Memoriam (2007), and the new Spiral XVI. Between them sits Khse Buon (1980), named after a traditional Cambodian instrument.

Program:

• Chinary Ung — PREAH VIHEAR (Spiral XVI) (2025) World Premiere co-commissioned by Del Sol Performing Arts and Miller Theatre

• Chinary Ung — Spiral X: In Memoriam (2007)

• Chinary Ung — Spiral III (1990)

• Chinary Ung — Khse Buon (1980)

• Chinary Ung — String Trio (1966) world premiere

Go if: you want to hear survival turned into six decades of meditation on memory.

Eunbi Kim: “it feels like a dream”

National Sawdust, Williamsburg · Tue, Mar 31, 7:30pm

Finding a way to compose a memoir with sound is demanding work that requires intention and courage. It means exposing yourself completely, turning private memories into public performance without the safety of someone else’s score. If that sounds like a heavy way to handle the past, you’re already on Eunbi Kim’s wavelength. She has spent her career commissioning composers like Daniel Bernard Roumain and Angélica Negrón to write music built for her specific style and temperament.

Working with the artist Xuan, Kim performs inside a haze of projected visuals that turn the stage at National Sawdust into distorted reality, pulling you into her inner world. The temporary nature of a memory is felt strongly here—a story from a parent or a snapshot of a childhood home. She is betting on the idea that if she is vulnerable enough on stage, you’ll recognize your own history in the resonance of the room.

Go if: you want a piano recital that operates like a meditation on memory.

Lubomyr Melnyk

Pioneer Works, Red Hook · Tue, Mar 31, 8pm

Lubomyr Melnyk spent the seventies in Paris playing for modern dance classes while living on almost nothing. That era of hunger and repetition forced an intriguing kind of focus. He developed a technique he calls “continuous music,” a way of playing so fast that the individual notes vanish into a solid wall of sound. He is now one of the most singular pianists alive. His hands move at speeds that look like a camera trick, sometimes topping nineteen notes per second.

At Pioneer Works, Melnyk will show why he is considered a physical anomaly. When he gets going, the piano stops being a box of hammers and strings. It starts to hum like a pipe organ or a heavy rainstorm. Microphones usually fail to catch the overtones he pulls out of the wood, so the resonant “choir” only exists in the room. It’s music that requires immense physical stamina from him and a quiet, meditative attention from you.

Go if: you’re curious about experiencing ‘continuous music’.

Opera & Staged Works

Opera classics, new productions, intimate stagings, and anything that tells a story through music and bodies in space.

Mannes Opera: The Silent Serenade (Die Stumme Serenade)

The Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, Hell’s Kitchen · Fri–Sat, Mar 13–14, 7pm · Free with registration

Mannes Opera is serious about discovery. They stage more new and overlooked work more than any other conservatory and integrate that curiosity into their training, alongside the canon and early music. This month that mission pays off with a long overdue U.S. premiere: Korngold’s The Silent Serenade, a late-1940s operetta written after he returned from years scoring Hollywood films. It was originally intended for Broadway before it slipped into obscurity. It’s a romantic farce set in Naples with all the moving parts: a dressmaker in love with an actress, a political engagement, an attempted abduction, a bomb plot, and a revolutionary twist that ties the knots. Emma Griffin directs, Cris Frisco conducts, and the Mannes Orchestra gives Korngold’s theater writing its proper shine.

Go if: you want a night that feels like both opera and Broadway.

Infinitesimal Opera

National Sawdust, Williamsburg · Sat, Mar 28, 7:30pm

Infinitesimal takes near-death experience research and turns it into chamber opera for singer and pianist. The opera tracks what researchers observed in people who were pronounced dead and came back. A transformative life review, encounters with lost loved ones, the passage between existence and what lies beyond it.

Composer-pianist Nicole Brancato and composer-baritone Jeremy Weiss perform their own work, directed by Kevin Newbury, reliving defining moments from their own lives through love, loss, laughter, and resilience. The piece blurs science, memoir, theater, and music into something cosmic and deeply human, showcasing queer and female voices at the edge of mortality.

Go if: you want chamber opera that gets experimental about what happens at the threshold.

You’re probably looking for more than just another season brochure. That’s what ODEA is for. We cover the concerts that don’t always get the glossy previews: string quartets in crypts, operas in downtown theaters, new music in old churches. The ones you usually hear about a week too late.

If that sounds like your thing, subscribe, share with a friend, or check out something unexpected. Have a concert to share? Reach out at odea@substack.com.

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February in New York is a test of will. The novelty of the first snow is long gone, replaced by an unrelenting, cold reality where daylight is in short supply and your resolutions feel like a lot more work than anticipated. This month, the classical music calendar seems to get it. It’s leaning into the discomfort and even finding beauty in it.

You might find yourself at the Church of the Ascension, where tenor Miles Mykkanen—fresh off opening the Metropolitan Opera’s season in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay—takes the solo role in Zoltán Kodály’s Psalmus Hungaricus. It’s a visceral lament shaped by the political trauma of post-WWI Hungary that the church’s lofted space only intensifies. For a less traditional immersion, you could go full sensory deprivation and sit in darkness for an hour while twenty-four musicians play Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain. Haas wrote it in 2000, unsettled by the resurgence of a far-right coalition entering government in Austria. The music tries to claw its way upward, but it’s dragged back down by clashing, out of tune harmonies that refuse to let it rise.

At Carnegie Hall, the Dover Quartet pairs Dvořák’s “American” Quartet with two New York premieres by Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. It’s a dialogue between two different perspectives on the American sound: Dvořák, the 1890s visitor, attempting to capture a national spirit borrowing from Black spirituals and Native American melodies he encountered in Iowa, and Tate, a contemporary voice writing from a perspective that has been rooted here all along.

If all of that feels like more confrontation than you're ready for, the month offers gentler refuges. Richard Goode and Anthony McGill team up at Town Hall for an afternoon of late Brahms and Schubert that shows off the warm, liquidy sound of the clarinet. And the New York Chamber Players perform Tchaikovsky and Wagner for anyone looking to spend Valentine’s Day in a room full of romantic longing.

What follows is a guide to February’s most compelling performances, the ones that reward the effort of leaving your apartment in winter.

The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

Voices of Ascension: Brahms, Kodály, Duruflé

Church of the Ascension, Greenwich Village · Thu, Feb 5, 7:30pm

If you’re more orchestra-leaning, choral concerts can feel like one of three things: ancient, overly familiar, or seasonal. Messiah season, requiems, you get the idea. This night is the exception. Voices of Ascension is doing three big pieces you almost never hear live, and they’re bringing the full apparatus: chorus, orchestra, and soloists who matter.

You’ll hear Brahms’s Nänie, a lush meditation on mortality that gets overlooked while everyone fixates on his symphonies. Then there’s Zoltán Kodály’s Psalmus Hungaricus, written in the post-World War I emotional wreckage and very much not interested in being polite. Tenor Miles Mykkanen is the soloist, and yes, he’s the guy who just opened the Metropolitan Opera season in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The evening closes with Maurice Duruflé’s Messe ‘cum jubilo’, which is scored for orchestra and a chorus of 30 baritones singing in unison.

Go if: you want rare gems, big sound, and a reason to feel superior in your group chat.

Juilliard String Quartet

High School of Fashion Industries, Chelsea · Sat, Feb 7, 7:30pm

You don’t usually get to hear one of the world’s most famous quartets in a high school auditorium in Chelsea. That’s part of the charm. Juilliard String Quartet shows up on the Mann Series every year and reminds you that chamber music doesn’t need velvet or chandeliers to hit hard.

This year’s program is heavy. You have Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 7 in F-sharp minor, Op. 108—a short, jagged, and deeply personal work written in memory of his late wife—paired with the monumental Beethoven String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132. The latter is famous for its “Heiliger Dankgesang” (Holy Song of Thanksgiving), a movement Beethoven wrote after a brush with death that some consider the most spiritual twenty minutes in the history of music. Bridging the gap is a new work by New York’s own Michelle Ross, whose Birds on the Moon provides a contemporary palate cleanser between the titans.

Program:

• Shostakovich — String Quartet No. 7 in F-sharp minor, Op. 108

• Bach — Prelude in E-flat major, BWV 852 (arr. for string quartet by Michelle Ross)

• Michelle Barzel Ross — Birds on the Moon (NYC Premiere)

• Beethoven — String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132

Go if: you want a big, serious quartet program in a setting that feels very New York.

Dover Quartet

Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Tue, Feb 10, 7:30pm

The Dover Quartet is one of those groups that justifies the heaping amount of praise they get like being called “one of the greatest quartets of the last 100 years.” They’re coming to Carnegie with a program that starts in a place of total vulnerability, opening with a Mendelssohn String Quartet in F minor that’s twenty-five minutes of raw grief written right after his sister died.

From there, the night opens up into a much wider lens on the American landscape. Dover pairs Dvořák’s famous 1893 “American” quartet, which was his outsider’s attempt to capture the spirit of the Midwest, with New York premieres by Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Tate’s Woodland Songs is especially tactile, using strings to mimic everything from the frantic energy of squirrels to the quiet grace of a deer. It’s a beautiful way to see the American canon expand, moving from Dvořák’s borrowed melodies to a voice that has been rooted here all along.

Program:

• Mendelssohn — String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 80

• Pura Fé — Rattle Songs (orch. Jerod Impichcha̲achaaha’ Tate) (NY Premiere, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall)

• Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate — Abokkoli’ Taloowa’ (Woodland Songs) (NY Premiere; co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall)

• Dvořák — String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, “American”

Go if: you want to hear a quartet good enough to back up the hype while they show you the many layers of the American sound.

Joyce DiDonato & Time for Three

Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Thu, Feb 19, 8pm

Emily Dickinson’s poems look deceptively simple until you sit with them long enough to realize they’re operating on multiple levels at once. Playful and death-obsessed, contained and wild. Pulitzer winner Kevin Puts built a semi-staged song cycle around them called Emily—No Prisoner Be, and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato is bringing it to Carnegie with string trio Time for Three. These four have been collaborating long enough to rack up multiple Grammys for Puts’s Triple Concerto, and DiDonato has been a knockout in his opera The Hours. Semi-staged means you get more than standing and singing, which fits Dickinson’s restless energy.

Go if: you’re an Emily Dickinson fan or just want to see what happens when opera meets a genre-fluid string trio.

Solo and Chamber Music

Smaller forces, tightly curated programs.

Sonnambula

Museum of Arts & Design (MAD), Columbus Circle · Sun, Feb 8, 11am

GatherNYC is the weekly Sunday morning move where you show up for the coffee and pastries and leave feeling like you got your dose of culture. This week it’s Sonnambula, the ensemble-in-residence at The Frick Collection, playing music built around the viola da gamba, basically a fretted cello with a warm, voicey sound.

Their Passing Fancy: Beauty in a Moment of Chaos program digs into early 1600s music. Fantasias that drift in and out of focus, dance tunes with sharp little turns, and psalms that start serene and end up gripping you by the collar. It’s old music, but won’t feel like it belongs behind glass.

Go if: you’re curious what early-1600s music sounds like when it lands in the present tense.

Njioma Grevious, Violin

Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center, Upper West Side · Tue, Feb 10, 2pm

Njioma Grevious had an absurd 2023-2024: she won the Avery Fisher Career Grant, took first at the Sphinx Competition, and swept the Concert Artists Guild prize. The Washington Classical Review said her playing “seemed to stop time,” and Merkin Hall is a great place for that to happen.

Her Tuesday matinee program is wide ranging. Bach sets the tone, then Perkinson’s Just Blues loosens the collar with bendy double stops. Tchaikovsky’s Scherzo adds some bite while his Melodie stretches out into a long singing line. After Mozart’s E minor sonata, she dives into the “Free but Lonely” world of the F-A-E sonata—a collaborative work by Schumann and Brahms based on a musical code for independence and solitude. Closing the afternoon is Prokofiev’s Second Sonata, a big, bright showpiece that’s still feels light on its feet. The program’s all over the map stylistically, but that seems to be her strength.

Program:

• Bach – Sonata No. 2 selections

• Perkinson – Blues Forms | Just Blues

• Tchaikovsky – Scherzo, Op. 42

• Tchaikovsky – Melodie, Op 42

• Mozart – Violin Sonata in E Minor K. 304

• Schumann – Intermezzo from F-A-E Sonata

• Brahms – Scherzo from F-A-E Sonata

• Messiaen – Theme & Variations

• Prokofiev – Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 D Major Op. 94

Go if: you want a midday concert that feels like a tour of what the violin does best.

The Escher String Quartet

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Tue, Feb 10, 7:30pm

They’re named after M. C. Escher, the Dutch graphic artist famous for those architectural drawings of stairs that loop forever. That’s the pitch for a great string quartet anyway: four people playing different lines that lock together so cleanly it feels like a magic trick.

The program is a classics-and-new-music sandwich. Mozart’s “Prussian” quartet is the friendly opener that lets the cello get the spotlight, more than usual. Then there’s a new viola quintet by Chris Rogerson with Paul Neubauer as the extra voice, adding a darker, woodier layer to the sound. They finish with Antonín Dvořák’s Op. 106, late-career Dvořák in full glow, the kind of piece that makes the room feel warmer even if it’s February.

Program:

• Mozart — Quartet in D major for Strings, K. 575, “Prussian”

• Chris Rogerson — New Work for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello (CMS Co-Commission)

• Dvořák — Quartet in G major for Strings, Op. 106

Go if: you’re ready for some meticulous, immersive chamber music in the city’s best sounding room.

Music From Japan Festival 2026

Scandinavia House/Victor Borge Hall, Murray Hill · Wed, Feb 12, 7pm

Music From Japan has reached its 51st season, which is a pretty incredible run for an organization dedicated to music that is the antithesis of “easy listening.” This year’s residency features the Momenta Quartet—the group you hire when the score looks like a topographical map—navigating a dense landscape of six composers.

The program is a survey of the Japanese quartet tradition, ranging from Somei Satoh’s ethereal, 1990s-era minimalism to a pair of world premieres by Shintaro Shibayama and Michiru Nakamura. It’s a three hour deep dive into the country’s most rigorous compositional minds, punctuated by a post concert forum for those needing to decompress.

Go if: you want to witness the heavyweights of contemporary music prove that the string quartet is still a radical medium.

Richard Goode, Piano, Sarah Shafer, Soprano, Anthony McGill, Clarinet

The Town Hall, Midtown · Sun, Feb 22, 2pm

Piano legend Richard Goode and NY Phil principal clarinetist Anthony McGill are teaming up for a heavy pour of late-period Brahms and peak Schubert. The program centers on the Brahms Clarinet Sonatas, which the composer wrote after he’d supposedly “retired” but realized he couldn’t quit the clarinet’s elusive sound. Soprano Sarah Shafer joins for the grand finale of The Shepherd on the Rock, which acts as a landscape painting in sound capturing the exact second winter isolation melts into spring.

Program:

• Schubert and Brahms — Selected Lieder (Shafer and Goode)

• Brahms — Clarinet Sonata Op. 120 No. 1 in F minor

• Brahms — Selected Piano Pieces

• Brahms — Clarinet Sonata Op. 120 No. 2 in E-Flat

• Schubert — The Shepherd on the Rock

Go if: you’re into Brahms, Schubert, and a clarinet sound as smooth as top-shelf whiskey.

Leonkoro Quartet: Role Models

Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Thu, Feb 26, 7:30pm

After cleaning up the European competition circuit, the Berlin-based Leonkoro Quartet is back in New York to make their Carnegie debut. They seem to be picking their biggest influences hence the “role model” title.

They start with the Carnegie premiere of composer Henriëtte Bosmans. A 20th-century Dutch powerhouse effectively ghosted by history until now, her work is the long overdue correction to the canon. Then it’s teenage Mendelssohn in full adrenaline rush. His A minor quartet is built around a single, obsessive question: “Ist es wahr?” (“Is it true?”), with violins that sounds less like polite parlor players and more like sopranos on the verge of a breakdown.

After intermission comes Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, a visceral, seductive negotiation with the afterlife, written while he was dealing with the reality of syphilis. If you’re going to make a Carnegie debut, that’s a pretty good way to leave a mark.

Program:

• Bosmans — String Quartet

• Mendelssohn — String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13

• Schubert — String Quartet in D Minor, D. 810, “Death and the Maiden”

Go if: you want to catch a young quartet right as the hype becomes real.

Orchestral

Full symphony concerts, chamber orchestras, and large ensemble programs.

18th Annual Black History Month Celebration: “American Landscapes”

Aaron Davis Hall at City College, Harlem · Thu, Feb 5, 7pm · Free with RSVP

The Harlem Chamber Players have been a neighborhood treasure for nearly twenty years, mostly because they’ve mastered the art of making the classical canon feel like it truly belongs to the community. Their "American Landscapes" program is a panorama where different histories share the same frame, featuring a lineup of entirely living composers.

It opens with Adolphus Hailstork’s Sonata da Chiesa, a spiritual journey for strings that mirrors a choral Mass, weaving tonal counterpoint through chorales and syncopated movements. Chen Yi follows with Shuo, her punchy, saturated writing that never sits still for long, and a world premiere by Eddie Venegasa who steps out as a soloist for his own string nonet. It concludes with Trevor Weston’s The People Could Fly, featuring solo violin, narrator, and dancers from the Harlem School of the Arts to bring the legendary African American folktale to life.

Program:

• Adolphus Hailstork — Sonata da Chiesa

• Chen Yi — Shuo

• Eddie Venegas — Viaje de Cantos (World Premiere)

• Trevor Weston — The People Could Fly

Go if: you want a free concert that feels like a real civic event.

New York Classical Players: Tchaikovsky & Wagner

W83 Auditorium, Upper West Side · Sat, Feb 14, 7:30pm · Free with RSVP

If your Valentine’s Day plans currently involve fighting for a 8pm reservation that’s doubled its prices for the night, consider this concert a solid pre-dinner move. The New York Classical Players are doing what they do best—staging a high drama, zero cost (okay, $20 suggested donation) concert that hits all the Romantic pressure points.

You’ve got cellist Mark Kosower taking on Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, and Wagner’s Liebestod, the literal “Love-Death” music from Tristan und Isolde. Usually, Wagner sounds like a 100-person wall of sound that could knock over a building, but this chamber arrangement by Yoomi Paick trims that sweeping drama to feel more intimate and exposed.

Program:

• Andrew Hsu — Arabesques (premiere)

• Tchaikovsky — Variations on a Rococo Theme, Op. 33

• Tchaikovsky — Pezzo capriccioso, Op. 62

• Wagner — Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde (arr. Yoomi Paick)

Go if: you prefer your Valentine’s Day drama on stage rather than at the host stand.

Parlando: in vain

Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center, Upper West Side · Sun, Feb 22, 3pm

What if the big moment in a concert wasn’t a climax, but the lights going out and staying out. Parlando is taking on Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain, a staggering hour-long piece where an ensemble of twenty-four play from memory in total darkness, finding each other purely by ear.

Haas wrote it in 2000, rattled by a far-right coalition coming to power in Austria, and the whole piece carries that unease. Tuning systems clash, chords carry beauty until they turn bitter. The music keeps trying to claw its way forward, building momentum, losing it, and trying once again. And because you’re sitting there in the dark with everyone else, it stops feeling like “new music” and starts feeling like a group experience.

Go if: you need an hour in the dark to contemplate the state of the world.

Experimental/Immersive

Cross-genre work, unusual spaces, and concerts that upend expectations.

Composer Portraits: Andrew McIntosh

Miller Theatre, Morningside Heights · Thu, Feb 5, 7:30pm

Andrew McIntosh writes music that sounds like it was scavenged from the woods. Field recordings, rhythms heard in nature, and newly discovered textures. He’s performing his own work on violin and viola alongside Yarn/Wire, the piano/percussion quartet that’s championed new music that doesn’t sound like anyone else. You’re getting a decade’s worth of McIntosh’s work, from 2012’s Hyenas in the Temples of Pleasure (great title, weirder than you’d expect) to Anadiplosis, a brand-new Miller Theatre commission.

Go if: you want contemporary music with a natural feel.

Ephemeral Circuits

Williamsburg Biannual, Williamsburg · Fri, Feb 6, 7pm

I’ve been meaning to get to the Williamsburg Biannual since it opened, and this is the first event that makes it feel like a real plan. The collective counter)induction turns the 10,000-square-foot space into a roaming concert, with soloists posted in corners like Easter eggs.

Expect a standing-room gallery crawl where the music is as industrial as the building. You’ll stumble upon things like moody viola loops or bluesy guitar riffs. But the most intriguing part is Michael Beil’s Key Jack that involves a pianist performing on an invisible, “virtualized” piano while dueling with a set of their own video avatars. Just the kind of high concept experiment that makes for a memorable performance.

Go if: you want a concert that behaves like an art show.

Sam Pluta Big Band

DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Midtown · Thu, Feb 12, 8pm

If the words “Big Band” conjure images of a brass section and matching suits, you’ve got the wrong show in mind. Sam Pluta is running a big band through a live electronics engine, where his laptop reacts as fast as the improvisers around him. This show is a world premiere tied to his album Slays Well with Others, and he’s stacked the lineup with experimental music all-stars.

This concert is presented by Wet Ink Ensemble, a composer-performer experimental music collective that lives for this kind of controlled chaos. Pluta’s electronics dismantle and refract what’s happening acoustically, blurring the line between acoustic instruments and digital production. It’s an hour of immersive music that goes between meticulously scored moments to free range improvisation.

Go if: you want to watch acoustic instruments get an electronic makeover.

Third Coast Percussion, Simone Porter, and Jlin: Strum, Strike, Bend

92NY (Kaufmann Concert Hall), Upper East Side · Fri, Feb 13, 7:30pm

If you’re looking for a Valentine’s Eve that trades sentimentality for something more invigorating, the 92NY has you covered. Strum, Strike, Bend brings together Grammy-winning Third Coast Percussion, the technically formidable violinist Simone Porter, and Jlin, the Gary, Indiana-raised electronic phenom whose work has journeyed from the dance floor to the Pulitzer shortlist.

The program centers on a world premiere from Jlin that pits her mind bending mixes against Third Coast’s clockwork precision. Also on the docket is Lou Harrison’s rarely heard Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra. It’s a dense, rhythmically intricate night of classical music when it gets its hands dirty.

Program:

• Jlin — Please Be Still

• Jessie Montgomery — Lady Justice / Black Justice, The Song

• Tigran Hamasyan — Sonata For Percussion

• Jessie Montgomery (arr. Sean Connors) — Suite from In Color

• Lou Harrison — Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra

• Jlin — New Work for TCP & Jlin (world premiere; 92NY commission)

Go if: you want “classical” that uses sticks, circuits, and muscle.

New York New Music Ensemble

87 Eldridge St (Museum at Eldridge Street), Lower East Side · Mon, Feb 16, 7pm

Only in New York do you get to hear brand new chamber music inside a restored 19th-century synagogue. Museum at Eldridge Street is all stained glass, painted details, and a big barrel-vaulted ceiling that loves to throw everything back at you.

New York New Music Ensemble has been a staple of the city since the ‘70s, and this program is built for a room like this. You’ll hear Alyssa Weinberg’s shimmering, kaleidoscopic textures in Refracted alongside Brittany J. Green’s shift.unravel.BREAK, which does exactly what the title suggests. In between, you’ve got Jacob David Sudol and Michael Hersch for the darker, more knotty stretches, and Paul Wiancko to send you out with something that moves.

The Program:

• Alyssa Weinberg — Refracted

• Jacob David Sudol — sons disperdu

• Michael Hersch — unwrung, apart, always

• Brittany J. Green — shift.unravel.BREAK

• Paul Wiancko — Distant Maneuvers

Go if: you want to hear new music in a room that makes everything sound bigger.

Huang Ruo “A Dust in Time” (NY Premiere)

National Sawdust, Williamsburg · Wed, Feb 18, 6pm (Rescheduled from Jan 25)

Imagine sitting still for an hour while a piece of music builds into something gorgeous, then slowly dismantles itself until you’re back where you started. Silence. Huang Ruo’s A Dust in Time works like those Tibetan sand mandalas monks spend days making before sweeping them away. It’s one continuous arc with no intermission.

You’ll find it either enchanting or maddening, maybe a little bit of both. The program opens with Song of Everlasting Regret featuring mezzo Kelly Clarke and pianist Joanne Kang. Ruo’s music pulls from Chinese folk traditions, noise, and Western classical without ever feeling unfamiliar. He calls it “Dimensionalism,” which okay, sure, sounds a little much until you hear it and realize he’s onto something.

Go if: you’re curious about music that treats time like something you can fold in half.

You’re probably looking for more than just another season brochure. That’s what ODEA is for. We cover the concerts that don’t always get the glossy previews: string quartets in crypts, operas in downtown theaters, new music in old churches. The ones you usually hear about a week too late. If that sounds like your thing, subscribe, share with a friend, or check out something unexpected.

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January in New York means lingering holiday hangovers turn into optimistic thoughts and maybe even some new goals. If “going out more” made it onto your list of semi-serious resolutions, this month’s classical music calendar is fully cooperating.

The Prototype Festival returns with its annual slate of provocative operatic work—the kind that ends up on the Times’ best performances of the year list. This year’s offerings include a chamber opera about environmental and personal collapse, and Sarah Kirkland Snider’s drama about a medieval nun that just got rave reviews in LA.

There are also quieter alternatives: solo Bach in a Brooklyn church, or a morning concert featuring harp, violin, and cello that makes a persuasive case for reconsidering the harp’s capabilities. For those looking for a big night out, the Cleveland Orchestra arrives at Carnegie Hall to perform Mozart and Shostakovich during what will be Franz Welser-Möst's final season as music director after twenty-five years.

January’s when the experimental and traditional both show up, and honestly, you can’t go wrong. Here’s what’s worth your time.

The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

Prototype Festival: Precipice (World Premiere)

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, East Village · Thu–Sun, Jan 8–11, various times

New York’s experimental opera scene keeps growing and Precipice has a team worth paying attention to: Obie-winning director Mallory Catlett, composer Rima Fand (who spent a decade touring with a Balkan string band before writing her first opera), and set designer Susan Zeeman Rogers stepping into her first role as lead artist.

A woman jumps off a cliff and wakes up mute. The story of her trying to speak again plays out inside miniature dioramas projected on a big screen, with seven singers, a string quintet, piano, and mandolin creating the emotional world around her. Fand’s folk-influenced score pulls in field recordings and art song, while the story finds the connection between environmental damage and personal breakdown.

Go if: you’re intrigued by the connection between a personal breakdown and a crumbling environment.

Hildegard (NYC Premiere)

Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, Midtown · Fri, Jan 9–Wed, Jan 14, various times

Medieval nuns usually get relegated to the background of an opera or end up as tragic victims. Sarah Kirkland Snider’s making one the lead in her first opera Hildegard, which the New York Times called “gorgeously mesmerizing” after its LA premiere.

The story takes place in 1147, when abbess Hildegard von Bingen is waiting for the Pope to decide if her visions make her a prophet or a heretic. In between dodging heresy charges, she falls for Richardis von Stade, the woman illustrating the very manuscript that'll determine both their fates. Snider's score is the real draw here. It borrows from 800-year-old Gregorian chants, but layers in shimmering strings and minimalist patterns that make the Middle Ages feel remarkably modern.

Go if: you want medieval drama with a love affair and music that doesn’t sound 800 years old.

Julia Bullock, soprano; Seth Parker Woods, cello; Conor Hanick, piano: From Ordinary Things

Kaufmann Concert Hall, The 92nd Street Y, Upper East Side · Fri, Jan 23, 7:30pm

You don’t need to clock every name on this program to know you’re in good hands. Soprano Julia Bullock just sang Cleopatra at the Met, cellist Seth Parker Woods has built a career on rethinking the canon and championing new voices, and Conor Hanick is the pianist contemporary composers trust with their most demanding scores. When these three get in a room together, it’s something you don’t want to miss.

Their trio project, From Ordinary Things, moves through Nina Simone, Ravel, Tania León, George Walker, Salvatore Sciarrino, Robert Owens, Gershwin, Previn, and Rodgers. It’s a songbook that keeps circling identity, love, and the stories we’re told as kids, put together by musicians who have a clear sense of each other’s instincts.

Go if: you want to hear a recital that feels curated from the inside out with three players willing to take real risks together.

Experimental/Immersive

Cross-genre work, unusual spaces, and concerts that upend expectations.

Prototype Festival: What to wear

BAM Strong, Harvey Theater, Fort Greene · Thu, Jan 15–Sun, Jan 18

Richard Foreman and composer Michael Gordon’s 2006 post-rock opera What to wear finally lands in New York. It’s a hyper-stylized exploration of what happens when image, status, and “looking right” start to run the show, a theme that feels more pointed now than it did twenty years ago.

There’s no plot in the usual sense. Instead the piece functions as a dreamlike fashion pageant. Fragments of text (“I need you looking at me,” “Am I still beautiful?”) loop over Gordon’s hard driving score performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars and a cast featuring vocalists Sarah Frei, Sophie Delphis, Hai-Ting Chinn, and St. Vincent. Enter a world where everyone’s busy looking and being looked at.

Go if: you’re in the mood for a fashion pageant that trades a traditional plot for sensory overload.

Sō Percussion: American Flow (Vol. 1)

Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Fri, Jan 23, 9:00pm

Sō Percussion has spent years making the case that drums don’t have to be in the background. Their night at Carnegie features four world or New York premieres exploring how jazz, hip hop, disco, and rock keep finding their way into experimental composition. Bryce Dessner (of The National) brings back his “chord stick”, a custom electric guitar he invented for percussion in his new piece while Caroline Shaw contributes a new quartet following her recent Grammy win with the group. The textures get even broader with tap dancer Michael J. Love joining as a fifth member and Kendall K. Williams adapting Trinidad’s “Panorama” steel pan style for marimbas and vibraphones. It’s a 9pm show with free drinks for the first 200 people, which is about as close as Carnegie Hall gets to feeling like a late night spot.

Program:

• Bryce Dessner — New Work (World Premiere, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall)

• Michael J. Love / Jason Treuting — A Better Genome (NY Premiere, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall)

• Caroline Shaw — Strange and Artificial Echoes (NY Premiere, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall)

• Kendall K. Williams — New Work (NY Premiere)

Go if: you want to hear what happens when percussion gets treated like the main event.

Huang Ruo “A Dust in Time” (NY Premiere)

National Sawdust, Williamsburg · Sun, Jan 25, 6pm

Imagine sitting still for an hour while a piece of music builds into something gorgeous, then slowly dismantles itself until you’re back where you started. Silence. Huang Ruo’s A Dust in Time works like those Tibetan sand mandalas monks spend days making before sweeping them away. It’s one continuous arc with no intermission.

You’ll find it either enchanting or maddening, maybe a little bit of both. The program opens with Song of Everlasting Regret featuring mezzo Kelly Clarke and pianist Joanne Kang. Ruo’s music pulls from Chinese folk traditions, noise, and Western classical without ever feeling unfamiliar. He calls it “Dimensionalism,” which okay, sure, sounds a little much until you hear it and realize he’s onto something.

Go if: you’re curious about music that treats time like something you can fold in half.

Solo and Chamber Music

Smaller forces, tightly curated programs.

NY Phil Ensembles at Merkin Hall

Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center, Upper West Side · Sun, Jan 4, 3pm

There is a unique pleasure in hearing members of the New York Philharmonic stripped away from the mass of a hundred-piece orchestra. This chamber program offers a clear view of their individual voices, moving from Frank Bridge’s Novelletten through the starker territory of Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 (the one he wrote after his friend died, so it’s got weight). Thomas Adès’s Catch provides a sharp, restless counterpoint to the more traditional Romanticism of the Dvořák Piano Quartet that closes the afternoon.

Program:

• Bridge – Novelleten

• Shostakovich – Piano Trio No. 2

• Thomas Adès– Catch

• Dvořák– Piano Quartet No. 2

Go if: you want to hear what happens when orchestra musicians get to shine.

Musicians from the Met Opera & Kathryn Lewek

Good Shepherd Church, Upper West Side · Mon, Jan 5, 7:30pm

The New York Times called Kathryn Lewek “the queen of the Queen of the Night,” which is the kind of title that’s earned when you can nail those stratospheric coloratura runs without breaking a sweat. Tonight she’s doing both Queen arias from The Magic Flute and The Abduction from the Seraglio, then pivoting to Verdi’s Traviata and Rigoletto. Players from the Met Orchestra round out the program with Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet and Verdi’s String Quartet, which means you’re getting fireworks and finesse. It’s free and general admission, so come early to get a good view of one of the best Mozart sopranos.

Go if: you’re down for a casual concert night with not so casual performers.

Bach in Winter — Michael Katz, Cello

Christ Church Cobble Hill / Old First Reformed Church, Brooklyn · Sat, Jan 10, 7pm & Sun, Jan 11, 3pm

The Bach cello suites are some of the most famous pieces written for the instrument. They show up in movies, commercials, and every cellist’s audition tape, but hearing them live in a church is different. The echo and resonance turn the space into part of the performance, which is exactly what Baroquelyn’s banking on.

Michael Katz just landed a gig with the Philadelphia Orchestra, but he’s back in Brooklyn for two nights playing Suites 1, 2, 3, and 5 unaccompanied, plus some pre-Bach composers who influenced them. Baroquelyn’s whole thing is bringing Carnegie Hall quality performances to neighborhood churches, which is the kind of neighborhood perk that makes living here worth it.

Go if: you’re ready to sit still and let unaccompanied Bach do its thing.

ChamberFest 2026 at Juilliard

Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Lincoln Center · Mon, Jan 12–Fri, Jan 14, various times

The last week of winter break is supposed to be for recovery. Sleeping in, seeing family, putting off the semester for as long as possible. But Juilliard students who sign up for ChamberFest come back a week early to form their own ensembles and spend a week working on repertoire with faculty and visiting artists they wouldn't normally encounter.

The featured program on January 12 includes Andrew Norman's Gran Turismo for eight violins, Loeffler's Two Rhapsodies for viola, oboe, and piano, Pierre Jalbert's String Quartet No. 5, and Brahms's String Sextet No. 2 with faculty-student ensembles. Beloved masterpieces next to newer voices that don't always get heard. All concerts are $20.

Go if: you want to hear what a week of focused rehearsal produces when the musicians are already this good.

Ivalas Quartet

Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center, Upper West Side · Tue, Jan 13, 2pm

The Ivalas Quartet is back on the list for a third month in a row, and this time they’re digging into Haydn, Bartók, Ravel, and Jessie Montgomery. A program that shows how their mission of spotlighting BIPOC composers sits alongside the standard repertoire. Since forming in 2017, they’ve made championing Eleanor Alberga, Carlos Simon, and George Walker feel like the obvious move and their Tuesday afternoon slot at Kaufman means you can catch them without giving up your evening even if that means calling out sick for work.

Go if: you’re up for a midday concert that looks to expand the canon beyond the usual names.

ekmeles: forgetting

Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew, Clinton Hill · Sat, Jan 17, 8pm

ekmeles doesn’t do easy listening. They specialize in the kind of microtonal and hyper-intricate contemporary scores that most vocal groups avoid, favoring precision over traditional choral warmth. Their program forgetting opens with Katherine Balch’s 2021 piece of the same name, then onto Wolfgang von Schweinitz’s DADA NONO & REJOICE (a title that promises chaos). With two world premieres and a U.S. premiere on the bill, the evening is a dense survey of what’s happening in vocal music right now with no safety net repertoire to fall back on.

Program:

• Katherine Balch - forgetting (2021)

• Wolfgang von Schweinitz - Plainsound Motet for Ekmeles ‘DADA NONO & REJOICE’ (2024)

• Jeffrey Gavett - Attributa sanctorum (2025) World Premiere

• Sinan Samanlı - Three Constitutions (2018) US Premiere

• Andile Khumalo - New Work (2025) World Premiere

Go if: you want to hear a vocal ensemble push the limits of what a human voice can do.

Ember (harp + violin + cello)

Museum of Arts and Design, Columbus Circle · Sun, Jan 18, 11am

This Sunday morning concert might just be the best way to start your day. Ember—harpist Emily Levin, violinist Julia Choi, and cellist Christine Lamprea—focuses on material that blows up the idea that the harp is just background shimmer.

Their program pairs Henriette Renié’s 1901 Trio with recent works by Reena Esmail and Angélica Negrón, female composers who know exactly how to write for this lineup. Renié was a 19th-century virtuoso whose work was often overshadowed by her male contemporaries. Here her trio carries real weight, the harp stepping in where you’d expect a piano and sounding anything but fragile.

Go if: you want to hear a harp played with real muscle and technical command.

Beethoven Unbound: Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Sun, Jan 25, 5pm & Tue, Jan 27, 7:30pm

Think of this program as Beethoven before and after. First you get Beethoven in his late twenties, writing a sleek string trio and a violin sonata that still sound like a young virtuoso showing what he can do at the keyboard and on the page.

Then we shift to the “Archduke” Trio, Op. 97, written when his hearing was collapsing and tied to what would become his last public appearance as a pianist. The cruel irony is that Op. 97 might be his most virtuosic piano writing, like he was trying to overpower his own deafness. The chronological programming lets you hear ambition curdling into something more desperate and honestly more interesting.

Go if: you like watching genius get messy.

Trinket Ensemble

Miller Theatre, Morningside Heights · Tue, Jan 27, 6pm · Free

Trinket Ensemble’s origin story began at NYC diners. Dan Lippel, Modney, Michael Nicolas, and Alice Teyssier have been playing for over a decade in other groups, meeting up to talk shop about the new music scene over coffee refills until someone said “we should just start our own thing.”

This performance marks their debut. Two world premieres by Rick Burkhardt and Modney, Wang Lu’s Trinket (yes, they named themselves after it), and their arrangement of a 13th century troubadour song by Beatriz de Dia. These are serious new music people who decided to make an ensemble that sounds like they’re having fun. It’s free, it’s an hour, and there’s a drink included.

Go if: you want to catch a new group before they outgrow free weeknight shows at Miller.

Program:

• Rick Burkhardt — new work (2025) world premiere

• Modney — new work (2025) world premiere

• Wang Lu —Trinket (2013)

• Beatriz de Dia — A chantar m’ér de ço qu’eu non volria (c. 1270) arr. Trinket

Axelle Fanyo & Julius Drake: Master and Apprentice

Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall Midtown · Wed, Jan 28, 7:30pm

Axelle Fanyo, fresh off a 2025 Grammy, steps into Weill Hall with Julius Drake at the piano—the song partner you call when you want every detail to land. The program is a tightly curated smorgasbord: Schoenberg’s early lieder paired with his later cabaret work (yes, Schoenberg did cabaret), Cage’s unhinged Aria, Messiaen’s mystical vocal writing, and William Bolcom’s Cabaret Songs to close. A lot of stylistic pivots in 90 minutes designed to show exactly why Fanyo is one of the most talked about sopranos in the game.

Program:

• Arnold Schoenberg —Vier Lieder, Op. 2

• Arnold Schoenberg — Selections from Brettl-Lieder

• John Cage — Aria

• Olivier Messiaen — Trois mélodies

• Olivier Messiaen — Selections from Poèmes pour Mi

• William Bolcom — Selections from Cabaret Songs

Go if: you want to catch a rising opera star before she blows up.

Timo Andres, Piano & Aaron Diehl, Piano

Carnegie Hall (Zankel Hall), Midtown · Wed, Jan 28, 7:30pm

Two pianists with completely different backgrounds, Timo Andres from contemporary classical and Aaron Diehl from jazz, sit down to figure out what American piano music sounds like. The program opens with Billy Strayhorn’s “Tonk,” then two pieces from Andres’s 2010 album Shy and Mighty: “How can I live in your world of ideas?” and “Pavane (pour un compositeur défunt).” Both pieces have an expansive, searching quality with flourishes of late-Romantic piano writing, feeling structurally free and moving easily across musical boundaries.

Diehl’s arrangement of Monk’s “Green Chimneys” keeps the off-kilter rhythms and angular chords intact for two pianos. Andres’s world premiere Monk Nocturnes follows, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, before Julia Wolfe’s my lips from speaking ends the night.

Program:

• Billy Strayhorn — “Tonk”

• Timo Andres — “How can I live in your world of ideas?”

• Timo Andres “Pavane (pour un compositeur défunt)”

• Thelonious Monk — “Green Chimneys” (arr. Aaron Diehl)

• Timo Andres — Monk Nocturnes (World Premiere, commissioned by Carnegie Hall)

• Julia Wolfe — my lips from speaking

Go if: you’re curious what happens when jazz and contemporary classical stop pretending they’re separate genres.

Orchestral

Full symphony concerts, chamber orchestras, and large ensemble programs.

The Cleveland Orchestra: Mozart & Shostakovich

Carnegie Hall (Stern Auditorium), Midtown · Wed, Jan 21, 8pm

Franz Welser-Möst is stepping down as the Cleveland Orchestra’s music director in 2027 after 25 years, which makes this one of those “catch them while you can” moments. He’s opening with Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, where five melodic lines weave together so seamlessly you’d never guess at the structural math involved. It is pure, orderly sunshine. The second half is Shostakovich’s Eleventh, a trauma-heavy memorial to a massacre that the composer’s own father lived through. Think ominous silence followed by brass and percussion hitting like gunfire and a finale that leaves you questioning whether you’re celebrating a victory or processing a tragedy. It’s a big emotional swing from grace to brutality in one evening.

Go if: you want to hear why people call this America’s best orchestra before their long term conductor leaves.

Program:

• Mozart — Symphony No. 41, “Jupiter”

• Shostakovich — Symphony No. 11, “The Year 1905”

Opera & Staged Works

Opera classics, new productions, intimate stagings, and anything that tells a story through music and bodies in space.

Heartbeat Opera’s MANON!

The Space at Irondale, Fort Greene · Tue, Jan 27–Sun, Feb 8, various times

I think the question Heartbeat Opera asks is “what if we just made this fun?” They’ve been doing it for years in Brooklyn, whittling operas down to something you can stage in a loft without assuming you already know the source material. This time it’s Manon, a 19th-century opera about a woman choosing between true love and money. They’ve trimmed it to 100 minutes, translated it into English, added new dialogue, and rearranged Jules Massenet’s music to sound like old-school Broadway.

Obie-winner Rory Pelsue directs and the cast includes people who’ve done Broadway—Emma Grimsley from Phantom's national tour as Manon and Matt Dengler from A Little Night Music as Des Grieux. The story still involves a convent escape, bad decisions, and someone dying, but now you can understand what everyone’s saying and leave before midnight.

Go if: you’ve always suspected opera might be good if someone just fixed all the stuff that makes it exhausting.

You’re probably looking for more than just another season brochure. That’s what ODEA is for. We cover the concerts that don’t always get the glossy previews: string quartets in crypts, operas in downtown theaters, new music in old churches. The ones you usually hear about a week too late. If that sounds like your thing, subscribe, share with a friend, or check out something unexpected.

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We’re talking flutists layering field recordings from river restoration sites with live electronics, harpists reclaiming the lost history of jazz and hip-hop, and quartets (and quintets) finding new beauty and perspective in Brahms and Beethoven. Here’s what’s worth your time.

The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

Anthony McGill, Clarinet with Isidore String Quartet

The Town Hall, Midtown · Sun, Dec 7, 2pm

New York Philharmonic principal clarinetist Anthony McGill teams up with the Isidore String Quartet to form chamber music’s most elegantly designed five person ensemble. Isidore opens with Beethoven’s Quartet in B-flat Major Op. 18, No. 6, where the young composer was still finding his voice in the quartet form. Then comes James Lee III’s new Clarinet Quintet, wedged between Beethoven and Brahms to show how contemporary voices fit into the lineage.

The second half brings Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet in B minor, one of those late career pieces where the composer looked at retirement and decided to leave behind one of his most gorgeous late-career works. The Isidore Quartet won the 2022 Banff Competition and landed an Avery Fisher Career Grant, which makes this a collaboration between five musicians at the top of their game.

Program:

• Beethoven — Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 18, No. 6

• James Lee III — Clarinet Quintet (world premiere)

• Brahms — Quintet for Clarinet & Strings in B-minor, Op.115

Go if: you want to hear the clarinet quintet form done right.

Brentano String Quartet

Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92NY, Upper East Side · Wed, Dec 10, 7:30pm

The Brentano String Quartet hasn’t played 92NY in years, so consider this their triumphant return. They are the kind of ensemble that digs deep, known for a rich, almost tactile sound that still manages to feel completely fresh, even with repertoire mainstays. They open with Haydn’s C Major Op. 54, No. 2, both witty and brilliant, before plunging into Bartók’s mysterious Fourth that pushes the form into darker, more challenging territory. Then Dvořák’s G Major Op. 106 swoops in to close, full of warmth and soaring melodies, like a collective sigh of relief. Fun fact: they recorded Beethoven’s notoriously difficult Op. 131 for the movie A Late Quartet, so trust that they know how to deliver the goods.

Program:

• Haydn — String Quartet in C Major, Op. 54, No. 2, Hob. III:57

• Bartók — String Quartet No. 4

• Dvořák — String Quartet in G Major, B.192, Op. 106

Go if: you’re ready for a string quartet’s full dramatic arc.

The Rhythm Method with Anaïs Maviel: Listen to the Rain

The Blanc NYC, Midtown · Sat, Dec 13, 7:15pm

When I caught The Rhythm Method and Anaïs Maviel perform Listen to the Rain at the Long Play Festival in May, the string quartet and voices blended in ways that kept surprising me. Good surprises. So many colors came through that it felt like watching weather change, always shifting well before anything got dull. Maviel, a composer, vocalist, and n’goni player, wrote this piece in alignment with the I Ching’s eight forces. Tonight she’s performing the full hour in the Heavenly Order, the sacred sequence used in Taoist inner alchemy practice, which sounds heady until you’re actually there and it just feels like listening to something unfold naturally. Visual artist Sean Webley’s film accompanies. Q&A at 7:15pm, performance at 8pm, reception after.

Go if: hour long meditations that hold your attention sound worth trying.

Experimental/Immersive

Cross-genre work, unusual spaces, and concerts that upend expectations.

BlackBox Ensemble: Scenes from the Post-Diaspora

National Sawdust, Williamsburg · Fri, Dec 5, 7:30pm

Baldwin Giang spent a Fulbright year in Taiwan studying pipa performance, then came back to write the multimedia work PIPA BOY. The piece explores the complicated question of belonging for later diaspora generations—people who feel connected to multiple places but fully belong to none. Giang pairs the pipa with ensemble and video collaborations from three international filmmakers. This U.S. premiere carries special weight. Giang, a Samuel Barber Rome Prize winner (one of American arts’ most exclusive honors), says this piece feels particularly personal. The innovative BlackBox Ensemble performs PIPA BOY alongside works by Anthony Cheung and Misato Mochizuki.

Go if: you want music that sits with hard questions instead of answering them.

OCTET: Paul Pinto String Quartet No. 3

CultureHub NYC, NoHo · Fri, Dec 5–Sat, Dec 6, 7pm & 9pm

Four musicians. Eight hands. Hundreds of pencils. Paul Pinto’s OCTET runs just under an hour and starts with a close up on string instruments getting “operated” on by the players wielding pencils like they’re about to go into surgery. It’s absurd, yet weirdly mesmerizing. Zach Herchen’s video and sound design creates visual tension, bringing every tiny scrape and tap into focus.

Two different ensembles play this game of Operation across two nights: Bergamot Quartet takes the stage Friday and The Rhythm Method follows on Saturday to show how different players handle the same strange set of instructions.

Go if: absurd and mesmerizing is exactly what you need right now.

yuniya edi kwon // PinkNoise

Zürcher Gallery, NoHo · Sun, Dec 7, 7pm

Experimental music in art galleries can feel like someone’s trying too hard, but yuniya edi kwon makes Zürcher Gallery feel like the right room for her compositions. This Guggenheim Fellow violinist and vocalist fuses Korean shamanic ritual with free improvisation, creating a sound that connects ceremony and composition through Korean folk timbres and American experimentalism. She ditches familiar tuning because standard systems don’t accommodate what she’s after. New York-based chamber ensemble PinkNoise premieres her commissioned work in the gallery’s close quarters where you’ll catch every detail.

Go if: you’re drawn to music that doesn’t play by the rules.

CORPOREAL: An Evening of Contemporary Music & Movement

Aaron Davis Hall, City College of New York, Harlem · Thu, Dec 11, 7pm

Contemporary music and dance sharing a stage could end up feeling forced. CORPOREAL makes it work. Musicians Graeme Steele Johnson, Giancarlo Latta, Aaron Wolff, and Fifi Zhang perform solo and chamber works by living composers—Inti figgis-vizueta, Gabriella Smith, Zosha di Castri, Reena Esmail, Viet Cuong, and John Zorn—while dancers Marisa Clementi, ALEXA GRÆ, and Leah Wilks respond in real time. The centerpiece is composer Yaz Lancaster’s world premiere commission, created specifically for this collaboration. At Aaron Davis Hall in Harlem, the program proves experiments in contemporary classical music belong outside Manhattan’s usual venues. Free admission.

Go if: the pairing of new music and movement feels more exciting than either would be separately.

Claire Chase with Annea Lockwood: Density 2036, Part XII

The Kitchen at Westbeth, West Village · Thu, Dec 11–Fri, Dec 12, 6pm & 8pm

Claire Chase’s continues her decades long expansion of the flute repertoire by dedicating her latest project to the massive restoration of the Elwha River in Washington State. Chase brings an arsenal of seven flutes—from tiny piccolo to massive contrabass—to perform alongside composer Annea Lockwood’s immersive seven-channel mix of the river’s sounds diffused throughout the performance space.

The Elwha was choked by dams for a century before finally being set free and roaring back to life, a powerful symbol of ecological resilience. Chase plays with the river’s current, sometimes fighting it and sometimes riding the flow. The lights go out and the room dissolves into an hour long, immersive noise bath.

Go if: you want to sit in the dark and let seven flutes and a river’s worth of sound wash over you.

Wet Ink Mini-Festival 2025

DiMenna Center, Benzaquen Hall, Hell’s Kitchen · Sat, Dec 13, 6pm & 8pm

Wet Ink’s third annual Mini Festival packs two concerts into one night (6pm and 8pm) where jazz improvisation crashes into contemporary classical composition. Artists in Residence Aurora Nealand on saxophone and voice and Ben LaMar Gay on cornet anchor programs that include Peter Ablinger alongside works by Wet Ink members Mariel Roberts and Alex Mincek. With Nealand’s New Orleans roots meeting Gay’s Chicago experimentalism, the music swings from structure to spontaneous invention and back. Between sets and after, hang with the artists in the lounge over refreshments. Pay what you can, free for students.

Go if: you want to hear what happens when New Orleans and Chicago influences shake up contemporary classical.

Solo and Chamber Music

Smaller forces, tightly curated programs.

Jennifer Koh, Violin & Thomas Sauer, Piano

Advent Lutheran Church, Upper West Side · Mon, Dec 1, 7:30pm

Most people don’t know Beethoven originally dedicated the Kreutzer Sonata to George Bridgetower, an Afro European violinist who premiered it in 1803, then got the dedication scratched out after a falling out. Jennifer Koh and pianist Thomas Sauer aren’t letting that stay buried. They pair two Beethoven sonatas with Vijay Iyer’s Bridgetower Fantasy, written specifically to reclaim that erased history. The Kreutzer is one of Beethoven’s most demanding works for violin and piano, the kind that requires both players to bring some serious fire. It’s part of Music Mondays’ free concert series, so arrive early for a seat and watch two musicians set the record straight.

Program:

• Beethoven — Violin Sonata, Op. 12, No. 1

• Vijay Iyer — Bridgetower Fantasy

• Beethoven — Violin Sonata, Op. 47, “Kreutzer”

Go if: Beethoven and historical justice for free is too good to skip.

Ekmeles: David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion

Church of the Intercession, Washington Heights · Tue, Dec 2 & Thu, Dec 4, 6pm & 7:30pm

There’s something about performing a Pulitzer winning work inside a crypt about a girl freezing to death that makes you reconsider your definition of holiday music. Composer David Lang fused Hans Christian Andersen’s bleakest fairy tale with Bach’s St. Matthew Passion to create a piece about suffering that’s worth sitting with. Ekmeles, the vocal ensemble has been performing this in the Crypt for years and it keeps selling out.

The story is simple: a poor girl strikes matches to stay warm on New Year’s Eve and dies. Lang treats each match like a prayer and Ekmeles navigates his microtonal harmonies in a space that forces you to reconcile death. Two performances each night with pre show reception included. This isn’t Nutcracker or Messiah, but if you want holiday music that plays with the season’s darkness instead of papering over it, this is where to find it.

Go if: you’re ready for a new holiday tradition this season.

Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time

The DiMenna Center, Hell’s Kitchen · Wed, Dec 3, 7pm

Olivier Messiaen wrote Quartet for the End of Time in a German POW camp during winter 1940-41, scoring it for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano—the only instruments available. He premiered it with fellow prisoners before 400 inmates and guards. Drawing from the Book of Revelation’s vision of an angel proclaiming that time will end, Messiaen built eight movements that suspend rhythm, as if trying to step outside ordinary time. Birdsong represents freedom, slow Louanges stretch like prayers, and the Apocalypse arrives with force. St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble performs what might be the 20th century’s most profound chamber work, written when everything else had been taken away.

Go if: you want chamber music that reckons with suffering and finds something beyond it.

The Tallis Scholars: Mother and Child

Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Midtown · Thu, Dec 4, 7:30pm

The Tallis Scholars have spent 50 years perfecting Renaissance polyphony. Director Peter Phillips founded the ensemble in 1973 to create the purity and clarity that lets every musical line emerge distinct yet unified. They’ve performed over 2,500 concerts and won Gramophone’s Record of the Year in 1987, the first early music recording to receive it. That precision comes to this holiday program celebrating the Virgin Mary: Tallis’s Missa Puer natus, Byrd’s Votive Mass, and the world premiere of Matthew Martin’s Salve Regina, commissioned by Miller Theatre. Ten singers, St. Mary the Virgin’s Gothic Revival acoustics, and centuries of English sacred music.

Program:

• Thomas Tallis — Missa Puer natus

• William Byrd — Votive Mass of the Virgin

• Matthew Martin — Salve Regina (2025) World Premiere commissioned by Miller Theatre

• John Nesbett — Magnificat

Go if: renaissance vocal music performed at the highest level appeals to you.

Balourdet Quartet: Wildest Dreams

Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Tue, Dec 9, 7:30pm

The Balourdet Quartet formed in 2018 at a New Mexico music festival after bonding over late night chamber music and meals by chef Antoine Balourdet, whose exceptional love of life inspired their name. Six years later, they’re making their Carnegie debut with a program that shows their range. Bartók’s Third Quartet opens, his most kinetic and edgy work in the form. Ravel’s String Quartet follows, his only foray into the genre and one that balances restraint with color. Brahms’s Third Quartet closes, written to escape the pressure of his first symphony and dismissed by the composer as a “useless trifle” despite revealing his lighter side. In Weill’s small setting, you’ll hear why this young quartet is building buzz.

Program:

• Bartók — String Quartet No. 3

• Ravel — String Quartet

• Brahms — String Quartet No. 3

Go if: you’re curious what six years of late night quartet sessions produces.

ETHEL: SEASONS NOW

Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, The Met, Upper East Side · Fri, Dec 12, 7pm

The Grammy-winning string quartet ETHEL takes Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and runs it through their own arrangements, then pairs it with new works by Ching chu Hu, Layale Chaker, Leilehua Lanzilotti, and Daniel Bernard Roumain. Vivaldi was writing Venice’s weather and landscape straight into his concertos, and these composers pick up the same idea from very different places and traditions. You hear the original, but you also hear how far the idea of a “season” can stretch now. After nearly three decades of treating classical music with rock band energy, ETHEL knows how to make a familiar score feel electric and new.

Go If: Vivaldi rearranged by a quartet with rock energy sounds better than another traditional take.

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center: The Brandenburg Concertos

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Fri, Dec 12–Tue, Dec 16

Imagine writing six of your best pieces and then they just sit there, unplayed for over a century. That is the wild origin story of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Now they are cornerstones of the Baroque world, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center rolls them out every December to set the holiday mood just right. You get all six in one sitting, which is a big deal.

Bach basically used each one to show off a different instrument combo, proving how much musical texture he could squeeze out of any arrangement. The Third has strings bouncing off each other. The Fifth gives the harpsichord a virtuosic solo that basically invented the keyboard concerto. The Sixth goes deep and dark, scored only for lower strings. It’s impressive watching musicians bring these to life, hearing how Bach builds such rich sound worlds with just a few players.

Program:

• Johann Sebastian Bach — Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048

• Johann Sebastian Bach — Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F major, BWV 1046

• Johann Sebastian Bach — Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major, BWV 1047

• Johann Sebastian Bach — Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major, BWV 1050

• Johann Sebastian Bach — Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in B-flat major, BWV 1051

• Johann Sebastian Bach — Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G major, BWV 1049

Go if: you’re ready to immerse yourself in Bach’s absolute genius for an evening.

Brandee Younger, Harp

National Sawdust, Williamsburg · Sat, Dec 13, 7:30pm

Brandee Younger plays harp like it was always meant to be in jazz clubs and R&B sessions, not just orchestras. She made history in 2022 as the first Black woman nominated for a Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition, reflecting 15 years of threading her harp through music with Common, Lauryn Hill, Pharoah Sanders, and Beyoncé with her track “Hortense” featured in Beyoncé’s Coachella documentary Homecoming. Her latest album, Brand New Life, just snagged an NAACP Image Award, proving she is forging new paths while honoring deep roots. At National Sawdust, you will not just hear the harp; you will experience an instrument set completely free, vibrant and electrifying.

Go if: you want to watch an instrument defy every single expectation.

Osvaldo Golijov: Dreams and Prayers of Isaac The Blind

Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center, Upper West Side · Mon, Dec 15, 7:30pm

Rob Kapilow’s What Makes It Great? is for nights when “let the music speak for itself” doesn’t cut it. He first shows you how the music works, then you hear the whole piece, then a short Q&A. This installment features clarinetist David Krakauer with the Ivalas Quartet in Golijov’s clarinet quintet, The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind.

Named after a 13th century Kabbalist, Golijov’s piece weaves klezmer, classical, liturgical, and popular music through three languages tied to Jewish history: Aramaic, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Krakauer virtuosity brought klezmer back into contemporary music, which makes him the right interpreter for a piece that treats tradition and experimentation as inseparable.

Go if: you like your music with roadmap before the journey.

Maxim Vengerov and Friends: The Annual Isaac Stern Memorial Concert

Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Tue, Dec 16, 8pm

Maxim Vengerov, a titan of the violin, calls up his A-list crew for an all-Brahms showdown at Carnegie. This Annual Isaac Stern Memorial Concert is a big deal. They are diving into two Brahms quintets, back to back, both peak chamber music. The Piano Quintet features Vengerov himself on violin alongside Vilde Frang, James Ehnes, Daniel Müller-Schott, and the absolute force of nature that is pianist Yefim Bronfman. It’s a thicket of sound where five distinct voices intertwine and carry the weight of a full orchestra.

The Clarinet Quintet follows with Anthony McGill, the New York Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist, weaving his clarinet through four strings in Brahms’s late masterpiece, written as the composer contemplated retirement. Both works demand technical skill and the kind of musical conversation that only happens when players of this caliber trust each other. Six world class soloists, one stage, all Brahms.

Program:

• Brahms — Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34

• Brahms — Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115

Go if: you want to see how much fire a handful of absolute masters can bring to Brahms.

Attacca Quartet

Board of Officers Room, Park Avenue Armory · Tue, Dec 16–Thu, Dec 18, 7:30pm

The Attacca Quartet has won two Grammys and arranged music from video games, which should tell you they’re not precious about what belongs in a concert hall. For three nights at the Armory’s Officers Room, they’re performing the North American premiere of David Lang’s Daisy alongside Bartók, Mendelssohn, and quartet arrangements of works written for other instruments. The Officers Room puts you close enough to hear the mechanics of how four players negotiate Bartók’s rhythmic complexity or Lang’s contemporary textures. Three nights, same program, pick whenever works for your schedule.

Go if: a salon style performance appeals to you.

Poland’s Sinfonietta Cracovia returns to the Unsound Festival at Lincoln Center, the Orchestre National de France lands at Carnegie with Daniil Trifonov tearing through French concertos, and in Brooklyn the adventurous Ghost Train Orchestra premiers twelve works inspired by cities around the world. The through line? Artists treating the repertoire as something to expand, not just to enshrine. Here’s what’s worth hearing this month.

The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

The Music of Anthony Braxton: Concert and Reflections with Mary Halvorson and George Lewis

Roulette, Boerum Hill · Wed, Nov 12, 8pm · Free with RSVP

Anthony Braxton turns 80 this year, and the International Contemporary Ensemble is celebrating with a rare intergenerational conversation. Before the performance, guitarist Mary Halvorson and composer George Lewis (both Braxton collaborators from different eras) sit down for a “mutual interview” that promises insider perspectives on one of experimental music’s most uncompromising figures.

Then ICE performs works by Braxton alongside pieces by Halvorson, whose compositional voice grew directly out of years playing in Braxton’s ensembles. Braxton’s music demands everything from its performers: intricate notation systems, improvisation frameworks, and a willingness to follow wherever his imagination leads. It’s part of Roulette’s season-long Braxton tribute, and it’s free with RSVP, which feels appropriately generous for an artist who’s spent five decades expanding what music can be.

Go if: you’ve been meaning to dive into Braxton’s world and want to hear Halvorson and Lewis trade stories.

Modigliani Quartet

Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Fri, Nov 7, 7:30pm

The Paris-based Modigliani Quartet has become one of Europe’s most sought after chamber ensembles. For their North American tour stop at Carnegie, they open with Hall György Kurtág’s Hommage à Mihály András—twelve miniature movements that flash past in under ten minutes, each one delivering a burst of color. It’s the perfect aperitif before settling into Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Major, Op. 18, No. 1, where the young composer was still playing by classical rules while plotting his revolution. Brahms’s Second Quartet closes the night, moving from 18th century classical to full Romantic intensity.

Program:

• György Kurtág — Hommage à Mihály András (12 Microludes for String Quartet)

• Beethoven — String Quartet in F Major, Op. 18, No. 1

• Brahms — String Quartet No. 2

Go if: three centuries of repertoire in 90 minutes appeals to you.

Orchestre National de France

Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Sun, Nov 9, 2pm

The Orchestre National de France makes its Carnegie Hall debut with an all-French matinee anchored by Daniil Trifonov, one of the most admired pianists working today. Trifonov, who won the Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein competitions before turning 30, takes on two French concerto pillars: Saint Saëns’s Second, which sets the bar for flashy concertos, and Ravel’s G Major, a crowd pleaser with jazz inflected passages that demands serious chops and musicality to come off well. Conductor Cristian Măcelaru opens with Elsa Barraine’s compact Second Symphony, a criminally neglected work by the French Resistance composer. The program ends with Ravel’s lush Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2, where the orchestra’s Radio France pedigree should shine.

Program:

• Barraine — Symphony No. 2

• Saint-Saëns — Piano Concerto No. 2

• Ravel — Piano Concerto in G Major

• Ravel — Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2

Go if: you want to hear what happens when one of France’s top orchestras and one of the world’s best pianists share a stage.

Orchestral

Full symphony concerts, chamber orchestras, and large ensemble programs.

Experiential Orchestra: Toward the Sea

All Souls Unitarian Church, Upper East Side · Sun, Nov 2, 5pm

If you’re staging a concert about the ocean, you might as well do it in Herman Melville’s old church. The Grammy-winning Experiential Orchestra turns All Souls into an underwater sanctuary, celebrating the sea’s mystery and the creatures that move through it.

The program drifts from James Blachly’s songs with text from Moby Dick and Michelle Ross’s meditative Whale Song to Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan, with pianist David Kaplan surrounded by strings. Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea II features flautist Catherine Gregory and harpist Bridget Kibbey, while Welsh composer Grace Williams’s Sea Sketches captures the sea’s raw power.

The evening concludes with George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale), where three masked players on electric flute, cello, and amplified piano. Proceeds benefit Oceana, so your ticket doubles as ocean advocacy.

Program:

• James Blachly — Delight and Insular Tahiti

• Michelle Ross — The Whale Song and The Whale’s Shadow

• Maurice Ravel — Une barque sur l’océan (arr. for piano and strings)

• Tōru Takemitsu — Toward the Sea II

• Grace Williams — Sea Sketches

• George Crumb — Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale)

Go if: you care about ocean conservation or the idea of experiencing music in Melville’s church sounds too good to pass up.

New York Philharmonic: Joshua Bell & Dalia Stasevska

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Thu, Nov 6–Sat, Nov 8

War leaves its fingerprints on music in unexpected ways. This program traces those marks across a century: Copland’s 1942 Fanfare for the Common Man, Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, and the US premiere of Ukrainian composer Bohdana Frolyak’s Let There Be Light, composed during her country’s current fight. At its center sits Thomas de Hartmann’s Violin Concerto, a WWII-era work that Joshua Bell recently unearthed. De Hartmann fled the Bolsheviks and studied with mystic George Gurdjieff, which gives you the sense that it was written by someone who saw the world collapse and still found something worth holding onto. Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska has been delivering aid to Ukrainian front lines since 2022, which gives her reading of this program particular weight.

Program:

• Copland — Fanfare for the Common Man

• De Hartmann — Violin Concerto

• Bohdana Frolyak — Let There Be Light (US Premiere)

• Britten — Sinfonia da Requiem

Go if: you want repertoire that responds to the moment.

Ghost Train Orchestra: Cities

Roulette, Boerum Hill · Fri, Nov 7, 8pm

Brian Carpenter’s Ghost Train Orchestra has made a name rescuing obscure composers from oblivion. Their 2023 collaboration with Kronos Quartet reimagining street musician Moondog won a German Record Critics Award, and last year David Byrne tapped them to arrange his album Who Is the Sky? Now they’re turning their attention to original compositions with Cities, twelve world premieres inspired by places around the globe. The 15-piece ensemble includes strings, brass, reeds, and a rhythm section, all accompanied by visuals that bring each location to life. Carpenter and his collaborators have created what they’re calling a “music travelogue,” where sound evokes culture, mood, and memory.

Go if: you’re curious what a musical postcard sounds like.

Immersive/Experimental

Cross-genre work, unusual spaces, and concerts that upend expectations.

Unsound New York: Sinfonietta Cracovia Plays Mica Levi / Lucrecia Dalt / Aleksandra Słyż

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Sat, Nov 1, 7:30pm

The Kraków-based Unsound Festival returns to Lincoln Center with Sinfonietta Cracovia—the Polish chamber orchestra founded in 1992 by passionate music students that evolved into an ensemble equally comfortable recording Netflix soundtracks and tackling contemporary Polish composers. Tonight they’re the bridge between three wildly different artists. Polish composer Aleksandra Słyż opens with Pure Voices, blending strings with electronics. Colombian musician Lucrecia Dalt follows with tracks from her new album A Danger to Ourselves, weaving pop hooks through experimental sounds and Latin rhythms. Then film composer Mica Levi (The Zone of Interest, Under the Skin) closes with pieces spanning their catalog. It’s part of a weekend featuring John Cale, RP Boo, and Ukrainian electronic artists. Choose-what-you-pay tickets makes it easy to take the plunge.

Program:

• Aleksandra Słyż — Pure Voices (2023)

• Lucrecia Dalt — selections from A Danger to Ourselves

• Mica Levi — THOUGHTS ARE BORN (2020); FLAG (2019); KOCHAJMY SIE (2025)

Go if: you want to hear what happens when a full orchestra drifts into experimental territory and never finds its way back.

Ekmeles: O Maria, ft. Mivos Quartet

The DiMenna Center, Hell’s Kitchen · Sat, Nov 1, 7:30pm

Ekmeles might just be New York’s sharpest vocal ensembles, known for tackling the kind of microtonal music most groups won’t touch. They team up with Vienna’s Mivos Quartet to create a sound that’s both tactile and disorienting. Evan Johnson’s O Maria splits ten players into two independent groups that never quite align while Taylor Brook’s Stray Birds imagines a lost musical tradition, setting Proto-Indo-European Tagore translations against sci-fi text by Olaf Stapledon. Ekmeles also sings Petros Leivadas’s reworking of 14th-century Mass fragments and Nick Dunston’s Afrofuturist piece Mothership, inspired by Octavia Butler.

Program:

• Evan Johnson — O Maria (World Premiere)

• Taylor Brook — Stray Birds (World Premiere)

• Petros Leivadas — Cuál es su Ardor (U.S. Premiere)

• Nick Dunston — Mothership

Go if: you want to hear Afrofuturism collide with 14th century polyphony.

Orange Road Quartet: Controlled Burn

Benzaquen Hall, The DiMenna Center, Hell’s Kitchen · Wed, Nov 5, 8pm

Some quartets stick to the classics. The Orange Road Quartet takes a different path and programs premiers from contemporary composers. Bobby Ge opens with music inspired by William Blake’s mystical poetry. Justine Leichtling turns Northern California wildfires into sound and Erich Barganier amplifies Appalachian fiddle music until it sounds like punk colliding with Xenakis.

After intermission, Alex Barsom fuses his Egyptian Christian background with electronics, Zachary Ritter explores anxiety states with recorded audio layered over live strings, and Matt Browne closes with a Nikola Tesla portrait full of mechanical grooves and nerdy musical jokes. Six composers, six completely different approaches to what a string quartet can do.

Program:

• Bobby Ge — Songs of Innocence and Experience

• Justine Leichtling — Controlled Burn

• Erich Barganier — Apocrypha of the Eastern Ranges (East Coast Premiere)

• Alex Barsom — Lead Tongue

• Zachary Ritter — window of tolerance (World Premiere)

• Matt Browne — Great Danger, Keep Out

Go If: you think chamber music’s best days are still ahead.

yMusic with Special Guest Emily King

Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown ·Thu, Nov 13, 7:30pm

The musicians in yMusic have classical chops and pop instincts, which explains why they’ve toured with Paul Simon, recorded with Bon Iver, and commissioned pieces from Andrew Norman. Tonight’s program leans into both worlds: Judd Greenstein’s Together opens, followed by the New York premiere of Gabriella Smith’s Aquatic Ecology, built from her underwater field recordings of coral reefs and kelp forests. Soul pop vocalist Emily King wraps up the night with new material from their ongoing collaboration, where her voice wraps around flute, clarinet, trumpet, strings, and brass in ways that feel more like a studio session than a chamber concert.

Program:

• Judd Greenstein — Together

• yMusic / Emily King — Selected Songs

• Gabriella Smith — Aquatic Ecology (NY Premiere, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall)

Go if: you’re refreshed by chamber music that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Talea Ensemble: Derivations

St. Luke and St. Matthew Church, Clinton Hill · Fri, Nov 21, 7:30pm

George Lewis and Pierre Boulez stand on opposite ends of the avant-garde spectrum. Lewis came up through Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the collective that launched free jazz and experimental Black music into new territory in the 1960s. Boulez built his reputation on European post serial precision. Both spent decades pushing music past its familiar boundaries.

Talea Ensemble puts their approaches side by side: Lewis’s Born Obbligato, a work for eight players that blends composed sections with hints of improvisation, and Boulez’s Dérive 2, which he expanded over nearly 20 years into a 45 minute labyrinth of musical ideas. Boulez’s piece needs 11 players navigating complex rhythms and harmonic changes, exactly the kind of challenge Talea lives for.

Program:

• George Lewis — Born Obbligato (2013)

• Pierre Boulez — Derive 2 (1988/2006)

Go if: you’re curious how two legendary composers approached avant-garde from completely different angles.

Solo and Chamber Music

Smaller forces, tightly curated programs.

PUBLIQuartet: What Is American – Rhythm Nation

Brooklyn Art Haus, Williamsburg · Thu, Nov 6, 7:30pm

PUBLIQuartet has spent the last decade blurring the boundaries between classical, jazz, and hip-hop, and their latest project Rhythm Nation might be their most ambitious yet. Following their Grammy-nominated What Is American album, they’re diving deep into American rhythmic traditions as a form of bodily autonomy and history keeping. The program includes Daniel Bernard Roumain’s propulsive Hip-Hop Etudes to Andy Akiho’s Quartet No. 1, with new commissions from Jeff Scott, Mazz Swift, and Eddie Venegas that each explore distinct rhythmic worlds. PQ treats the string quartet like a jazz combo, leading with instinct rather than following a score’s every instruction.

Program:

• Daniel Bernard Roumain — Hip-Hop Etudes

• Andy Akiho — Quartet No. 1 “Mobile on a Stream into the Sound”

• Jeff Scott — new work

• Mazz Swift — new work

• Eddie Venegas — new work

Go if: your Spotify playlists include both Beethoven and Kendrick.

The Viano Quartet

Stone Circle Theatre, Ridgewood · Sat, Nov 8, 7pm · Free with RSVP

Fresh off winning the Banff Competition and landing a 2025 Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Viano Quartet plays a free concert in Queens that feels like finding money in your coat pocket. The program follows the evolution of the string quartet across two centuries with Haydn’s unfinished Op. 103, written as his health failed, Mendelssohn’s D major Op. 44, where he balanced classical structure with Romantic expression; and Shostakovich’s Ninth from 1964, composed during the uncertain times after Stalin’s death, finds a balance between tension and relief. One hour, no intermission, in an intimate space, and it costs nothing.

Program:

• Haydn — Quartet in D minor for Strings, Hob. III:83, Op. 103 (1803)

• Mendelssohn — Quartet in D major for Strings, Op. 44, No. 1 (1838)

• Shostakovich — Quartet No. 9 in E-flat major for Strings, Op. 117 (1964)

Go if: you want world class chamber music without the Manhattan prices.

Ivalas Quartet

High School of Fashion Industries, Chelsea · Sat, Nov 8, 7:30pm

The Ivalas Quartet built their mission around changing what string quartet repertoire looks like. Since 2017, they’ve championed BIPOC composers like Eleanor Alberga, Jessie Montgomery, and Carlos Simon, treating them as essential rather than supplementary. Tonight they pair Derrick Skye’s Deliverance, which they premiered last year through a Caramoor commission, with Berg’s expressionist Op. 3 and Debussy’s lush G minor Quartet. After studying with both the Juilliard and Takács Quartets, they’ve developed the chops to make their curatorial vision stick. The result? Chamber music that sounds like America actually looks.

Program:

• Derrick Skye — Deliverance

• Berg — String Quartet Op. 3

• Debussy — String Quartet in G minor

Go if: You want to hear the string quartet canon expanded beyond the usual names.

Beatrice Rana, Piano

Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Wed, Nov 12, 8pm

Debussy’s etudes exist to separate pianists who can play the notes from pianists who can actually handle them. The composer himself said they require “formidable hands” just to crack open. Italian pianist Beatrice Rana proved she had those hands in her 2022 Carnegie recital with Book I, and now she’s back to take on Book II’s six equally unforgiving pieces. Also on the bill is Prokofiev’s arresting Sixth Sonata, which she’s been performing to considerable acclaim, plus selections from his Romeo and Juliet and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker in Mikhail Pletnev’s virtuosic arrangements.

Program:

• Prokofiev — Selections from Ten Pieces from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 75

• Debussy — Études, Book II

• Tchaikovsky — Selections from The Nutcracker Suite (arr. Mikhail Pletnev)

• Prokofiev — Piano Sonata No. 6 in A Major, Op. 82

Go If: You want to hear Debussy’s etudes tackled by someone fearless.

Composer Portraits: Anthony Cheung

Miller Theatre, Columbia University, Morningside Heights · Thu, Nov 13, 7:30pm

Anthony Cheung writes music that keeps you guessing about where sounds actually come from. Is that piano or prepared piano? Acoustic or electronic? His obsession with tuning and timbral ambiguity makes for pieces that feel like the ground is shifting beneath your feet. Miller Theatre’s Composer Portraits series gives him a proper showcase with Claire Chase on flute, Yarn/Wire handling piano and percussion, and the JACK Quartet on strings. The program includes Twice Removed, Tactile Values, and The Real Book of Fake Tunes, with Cheung improvising an opener at the piano.

Program: all works by Anthony Cheung

• Improvised Intro (2025)

• Twice Removed (2024)

• Tactile Values (2023)

• The Real Book of Fake Tunes (2015)

Go if: you’re curious about how contemporary composers mess with your perception.

Kronos Quartet

Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center, Upper West Side · Fri, Nov 14, 7:30pm

After 50 years of commissioning over a thousand works and proving that string quartets can handle much more than Haydn, Kronos is still going. The current lineup features founding violinist David Harrington alongside Gabriela Díaz, Ayane Kozasa, and Paul Wiancko, presenting a wide ranging program: Garth Knox’s Satellites, Aleksandra Vrebalov’s My Desert, My Rose, two Terry Riley pieces including the hypnotic Cadenza on the Night Plain, Angélica Negrón’s Marejada, and Jungyoon Wie’s Starlings. Students from Kaufman’s music programs join for parts of the concert, which tracks for a group that’s always been about passing the torch forward.

Program:

• Garth Knox – Satellites

• Aleksandra Vrebalov — My Desert, My Rose

• Traditional – Tusen Tankar

• Terry Riley – Cadenza on the Night Plain

• Angélica Negrón – Marejada

• Jungyoon Wie – Starlings

• Terry Riley – Sunrise Jam

Go If: you want to hear a living legend of contemporary chamber music.

Hayato Sumino, Piano

Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Tue, Nov 18, 8pm

Most classical pianists stay in their lane. Hayato Sumino arranges video game soundtracks, writes his own nocturnes, and pairs Bach with Kapustin like it’s the most natural thing in the world. The Japanese pianist makes his Carnegie debut with a set that jumps from Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier to his own Chopin variations to Ravel’s Boléro arranged for solo piano. That last one means watching one person play what Ravel wrote for an entire orchestra. The program also includes Nikolai Kapustin’s jazz inflected etudes, Friedrich Gulda’s neoclassical works, and three original nocturnes with titles like “Once in a Blue Moon.” Sumino built his reputation by refusing to treat classical music, film scores, and jazz as separate worlds.

Program:

• J. S. Bach — Prelude and Fugue in C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, BWV 870

• J. S. Bach — Partita No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 826

• Chopin — Nocturne in C Minor, Op. 48 No. 1

• Chopin — Scherzo No. 1 in B Minor

• Gulda — Prelude and Fugue

• Hayato Sumino — New Birth (after Chopin)

• Hayato Sumino — Recollection (after Chopin)

• Kapustin — Selections from Eight Concert Etudes, Op. 40

• Hayato Sumino — Nocturne No. 1, “Pre Rain”

• Hayato Sumino — Nocturne No. 2, “After Dawn”

• Hayato Sumino — Nocturne No. 3, “Once in a Blue Moon”

• Ravel — Boléro (arr. Hayato Sumino)

Go if: you find pianists who ignore genre boundaries refreshing.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano with Sir George Benjamin, piano

Kaufmann Concert Hall, The 92nd Street Y, Upper East Side · Wed, Nov 19, 7:30pm

When a pianist and composer have worked together for decades, you hear it. Pierre Laurent Aimard, who studied under Messiaen and Boulez, joins British composer George Benjamin for the New York premiere of Benjamin’s new work for piano four hands. Composer and interpreter sit side by side navigating Benjamin’s intricate world together. The program opens with a miniature by Nikolai Obukhov, a Russian mystic composer who invented his own notation system. Then Aimard plays Boulez’s First Piano Sonata, a piece he’s been championing since studying with the composer himself. Benjamin’s Shadowlines closes the first half, written in a style that turns dense textures into something you feel physically. After the four hands premiere, Aimard ends with Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin.

Program:

• Nikolai Obukhov — Révélation

• Pierre Boulez — Sonata for Piano No. 1

• George Benjamin — Shadowlines

• Maurice Ravel — Le Tombeau de Couperin

• George Benjamin — Divisions for Piano Four Hands (NY premiere)

Go if: you’re curious how a lifelong musical partnership translates when both sit at the same piano.

Curtis New Music Ensemble: We The Artists

Buttenwieser Hall, The 92nd Street Y, Upper East Side · Fri, Nov 21, 7:30pm

Curtis Institute present We the Artists, a program honoring America’s 250th through works by living composers who reflect the nation’s diversity. Clarice Assad’s Canções da America draws from South American rhythms and Indigenous traditions, while Carlos Simon’s Giants honors five iconic Black Americans. Valerie Coleman’s Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes explores Black Indigenous heritage, and Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman offers her brilliant riposte to Copland’s original. It’s a program that broadens the usual picture of American music, making space for composers who haven’t been programmed as often as they should be.

Program:

• Clarice Assad — Canções da America

• Carlos Simon — Giants

• Joan Tower — Selections from Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman

• Valerie Coleman — Freedman of the Five Civilized Tribes

Go if: you want to hear America’s 250th through music that actually sounds like the country.

Exponential Ensemble: Origins

Americas Society, Upper East Side · Fri, Nov 21, 7pm · Free with RSVP

A decade after their last appearance, Exponential Ensemble returns to the Americas Society with a program rooted in folklore and the natural world. Clarinetist Pascal Archer joined by violin and piano leads off with Paul Schoenfield’s klezmer-inspired trio that’s reason enough to hear this concert on its own. Reena Esmail’s Tasveer follows, drawing on her Hindustani training and Indian musical heritage. Robert Paterson’s Summit Trio reflects on our ties to nature and our place within it, and Lowell Liebermann’s ragtime-tinged Trio for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano brings the evening to a close.

Program:

• Paul Schoenfield — Trio

• Reena Esmail — Tasveer

• Robert Paterson — Summit Trio

• Lowell Liebermann — Trio for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano

Go if: you want to hear chamber music from many different cultures.

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The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

International Contemporary Ensemble Performs Jennie C. Jones

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Upper East Side · Sun, Oct 5, 2pm

Jennie C. Jones makes art that looks like sound and sounds like art. The artist behind those abstract string instruments currently living on the Met’s roof has spent years creating graphic scores: visual works that function as musical notation without staff lines, time signatures, or any of the usual rules.

International Contemporary Ensemble, which has earned its reputation as the country’s most fearless new music collective, will perform these scores alongside a discussion with Jones and ICE artistic director George Lewis about how minimalism’s legacy gets rewritten when you throw traditional notation out the window. It’s the sort of afternoon that reshapes the Met’s auditorium into a workshop, with musicians and artists finding ways to translate visual abstraction into sound.

Go if: you want to pair a contemporary music concert with an afternoon walking through galleries.

La Sonnambula

Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center · Mon, Oct 6–Sat, Nov 1

Nadine Sierra gets to show off in Vincenzo Bellini’s La Sonnambula, where a young woman’s sleepwalking nearly destroys her engagement when she’s found in another man’s bedroom. The whole village turns against Amina until they realize she was asleep the entire time, which gives Bellini an excuse for some of the most gorgeous, demanding soprano writing ever put to paper. Sierra has been racking up ovations in these roles at the Met, Teatro Real in Madrid, and La Scala. Her recordings impress, but heard live she’s on another level. The voice, the presence, the way she fully inhabits a role. Rolando Villazón directs this new production, keeping it in the Swiss Alps but using the sleepwalking to dig into psychological territory.

Go if: you want to hear Sierra tackle one of opera’s most demanding soprano showcases.

Salonen Conducts Boulez & Bartók

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Oct 9–11, 7:30pm

This is the Philharmonic as you’ve never seen it: broken into eight groups across the hall, brass and percussion calling back and forth while dancers from Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project move through the aisles. That’s Boulez’s Rituel and Esa-Pekka Salonen is the one bold enough to stage it. Add Stravinsky’s lean, jazzy Octet and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, a showpiece that turns the orchestra into a parade of soloists, giving each section the spotlight before a rousing finale.

Go if: you want to see the Phil push past the idea of a standard concert and into something immersive.

Belcea Quartet

Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Wed, Oct 22, 7:30pm

The London-based Belcea Quartet brings the kind of Mozart and Beethoven playing that only comes from years of serious work, and Zankel’s intimate size and revealing acoustics puts you close enough to hear it all. They begin with Mozart’s “Dissonance” Quartet, named for an opening so strange that early publishers thought it must be a mistake. Today it just sounds a little off-kilter before the music settles. Then comes a world premiere by Brett Dean, the Australian composer and former Berlin Phil violist whose music combines a player’s instinct with inspirations drawn from literature, politics, and art. The evening ends with Beethoven’s final completed quartet, No. 16 in F, Op. 135, packed with tongue-in-cheek wit and rhythmic puzzles before closing on his famous question and answer motto: “Must it be? It must be!”

Go if: you want to hear one of Europe’s top quartets perform a wide-ranging concert from buttoned-up Mozart to restless late Beethoven.

Orchestral

Full symphony concerts, chamber orchestras, and large ensemble programs.

Bard East/West Ensemble: Chamber Opera & Dance Concert

Frederick P. Rose Hall, Lincoln Center · Sun, Oct 5, 3pm

The Bard East/West Ensemble feels like the most interesting experiment happening in classical music: what if you mixed Chinese and Western instruments instead of just programming them back-to-back? Closing this year’s China Now Festival, they’re doing a triple-header that moves from Guan Naizhong’s percussion-heavy Age of the Dragon to Ma Hanrui’s chamber opera reworking of M. Butterfly (with a Peking opera performer thrown into the mix) to Wang Danhong’s Four Seasons in Lingering Garden with live dancers.

Go if: you want to hear Chinese and Western traditions meeting in the same piece, not just sharing a program.

Parlando: The Broken Promise

Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center, Upper West Side · Tue, Oct 7, 7:30pm

Conductor Ian Niederhoffer always has a story behind his programming choices. Parlando’s season opener traces German-Jewish identity through three carefully chosen works: Mendelssohn’s buoyant Son and Stranger overture from an era of assimilation and hope, Schreker’s darkly beautiful Birthday of the Infanta Suite as shadows gathered, and Strauss’s Metamorphosen, that devastating 1945 elegy for cultural collapse and moral failure. Niederhoffer speaks between pieces, explaining his choices—brief, thoughtful context you typically don’t see at orchestra concerts, revealing how these works map onto a community’s rise and devastating betrayal.

Go if: you want a program that actually gives the music the context it deserves.

Tchaikovsky’s Fifth & Korngold

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Thu, Oct 23–Sat, Oct 25

Venezuelan conductor Diego Matheuz brings his El Sistema background to a program built on big, memorable melodies. Frank Huang, the Phil’s own concertmaster, takes on Korngold’s Violin Concerto, that shamelessly lyrical score built from the composer’s own film music. Tchaikovsky’s Fifth follows, from its brooding fate motif through to its triumphant finale. The evening opens with Inocente Carreño’s Margariteña, a piece rooted in Venezuelan folk melodies that plays directly to Matheuz’s roots.

Go if: you want a night at Lincoln Center with music that feels both lush and approachable.

Philharmonia Orchestra

Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Tue, Oct 28, 8pm

Marin Alsop brings London’s Philharmonia to Carnegie for an evening that dares you not to have a good time. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture tells the whole tragic love story in 20 minutes of music that’s as cinematic as any movie soundtrack. Alexandre Kantorow plays Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, which alternates between machine-like brilliance and unexpectedly rich melody. The kind of piece that shows off both pianist and orchestra without ever letting up. The evening closes with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, where every section gets their moment to shine.

Go if: you want an evening of relentless energy and virtuosic orchestral playing.

The Philadelphia Orchestra

Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Fri, Oct 31, 8pm

The Philadelphia Orchestra is celebrating 125 years by doing what they do best: sounding absolutely gorgeous. Yannick Nézet-Séguin brings the group to Carnegie with Emanuel Ax playing Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, written during some of the composer’s darkest years when he was grappling with his increasing deafness. The evening opens with William Grant Still’s Wood Notes, music that captures the American South in ways most classical composers never bothered to try, then closes with Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, his final statement in the form and one that refuses the usual consoling conclusion.

Go if: you want to hear an orchestra take on three very different pieces that all happen to show off what they do best.

Immersive/Experimental

Cross-genre work, unusual spaces, and concerts that upend expectations.

JJJJJerome Ellis

Roulette Intermedium, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn · Fri, Oct 3, 8pm

JJJJJerome Ellis doesn’t easily fit into any one category. As a stuttering, Afro-Caribbean composer, poet, and performer his work can move from meditative saxophone loops to electronics, dulcimer, voice, or storytelling. He’s written for theater at The Shed, improvised with rappers, and studied samba in Brazil on a Fulbright, always with the same aim: sound as a way to heal and connect. Expect a performance that blends concert, improvisation, and story.

Go if: you want a night that feels less like a gig and more like an invitation to listen differently.

Stephen Prina at MoMA — String Quartet for Six Players and The Way He Always Wanted It XI

Marron Atrium, Museum of Modern Art, Midtown · Sat, Oct 4 & Sun, Oct 5, 8pm

Stephen Prina’s bringing his brand of conceptual music to the museum’s main atrium, where Either/Or takes Mozart’s String Quartet No. 15 in D Minor and doubles the violins, leaving key choices to the roll of a die. The Way He Always Wanted It XI follows: six flutists playing a melody that architect Bruce Goff originally wrote for player piano. In MoMA’s echoing atrium it reads as conceptual art masquerading as a concert—or maybe the other way around.

Go if: you want to hear Mozart treated less as a score and more as an art experiment.

Wet Ink Ensemble Presents Season-Opening Concert: Wubbels Chimeric Form / Madison Greenstone

Tenri Cultural Institute, Greenwich Village · Sat, Oct 11, 8pm

Wet Ink opens their 27th season with Eric Wubbels tackling one of chamber music’s most rare and slightly awkward combinations: violin, French horn, and piano. Only Brahms and Ligeti have bothered with this form before, but Wubbels treats the trio like a single mutant instrument in his Chimeric Form—three movements of spliced up instrumentation in ways that blur their individual identities. Madison Greenstone of TAK Ensemble opens with solo clarinet, exploring what they call “exstatic resonances” at high volume. Think acoustic mirages and spatial weirdness that makes the room feel bigger and smaller at the same time.

Go if: you like your new music genuinely new rather than politely contemporary.

Archive of Desire: Reimagining Cavafy’s Sensual World

National Sawdust, Williamsburg · Thu, Oct 16, 7:30pm

For the 160th anniversary of Greek poet C. P. Cavafy’s birth, four artists remake his sensual, exiled Alexandria onstage. National Book Award–winner Robin Coste Lewis reads from her new book shaped by time in the Cavafy archive as Vijay Iyer (piano/electronics) and Jeffrey Zeigler (cello) build a live score around her voice. Behind them, Julie Mehretu’s projected abstract paintings add a vivid visual layer to the words and music.

Go if: you want an intimate, multi-sensory night where poetry, music, and painting come together.

Pop-Up Concerts: Celebrating 20 Years of Yarn/Wire

Miller Theatre, Morningside Heights · Mon, Oct 27, 6pm · Free

Yarn/Wire has spent two decades proving that a quartet of two pianists and two percussionists can sound like anything: a gamelan, a rock band, a thunderstorm, or something you’ve never heard before. They’ve built their reputation by working directly with composers, shaping new scores in rehearsal rooms before they ever hit a stage, which makes every performance feel custom-fit. Miller Theatre marks their 20th season with a three-concert festival, starting with this free Pop-Up: an hour of music, a drink in your hand, and a chance to hang with the players afterward.

Go if: you want to catch the city’s most fearless piano-percussion ensemble in a setting that feels closer to a loft party than a formal concert.

Gabriel Kahane & Friends: only light can do that

Buttenwieser Hall, The 92nd Street Y, New York · Oct 31, 7:30pm

Gabriel Kahane’s résumé reads like several musicians rolled into one. He has written for the L.A. Philharmonic, toured with Sufjan Stevens, scored Broadway pit bands, and released a run of indie albums. He grew up the son of a conductor, but his own work lives in the in-between—songs that carry the intimacy of a living room set but with harmonic depth of orchestral music. For this 92NY return (last year sold out), he’s joined by a rhythm section that can pivot from folk to jazz, plus a string quartet that enriches the sound without losing any edge.

Go if: you want a Friday night that threads art song, indie pop, and chamber music together so smoothly you’ll forget it’s Halloween.

Solo and Chamber Music

Smaller forces, tightly curated programs.

Composer Portraits: Helmut Lachenmann — Complete String Quartets

Miller Theatre, Morningside Heights · Thu, Oct 9, 7:30pm

Helmut Lachenmann turns 90 this year and Miller marks it by handing his complete quartets to the JACK Quartet, the group most willing to live inside his sound world. Lachenmann calls what he does musique concrète instrumentale—writing that treats instruments as physical objects first and melodic devices second. In his quartets that means bow hair scraping, strings tapped with wood, whispers of resonance, sudden bursts of noise. If that all sounds heady, JACK Quartet will bring it back to what Lachenmann wanted: sound you can feel, not just think about.

Go if: you want to experience a landmark figure in experimental music played by the quartet most devoted to his work.

PRISM Quartet: Tarnish

Christ & St. Stephen’s Church · Sun, Oct 12, 4pm · Pay-what-you-wish

After forty years of commissioning new work, PRISM Quartet has basically turned the saxophone quartet into a legitimate classical ensemble, which is no small feat. This pay-what-you-wish concert brings together five composers who’ve written directly for the group: Nina C. Young’s Tarnish scrapes away noise to reveal fleeting beauty underneath, Marcos Balter’s Yarn treats sound like delicate thread that might snap, and Roberto Sierra’s Graffiti II fires off 14 miniatures like graffiti tags on a storefront’s roll-down gate. The church acoustics will underscore why PRISM is considered the gold standard. Four saxophones that sound like a small orchestra when they’re playing at this level.

Go if: you want to hear one of the best sax quartets take on new music from the best young minds.

Matthias Goerne, Baritone · Daniil Trifonov, Piano

Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, Midtown · Sun, Oct 19, 2pm

Matthias Goerne has spent much of his career inside Schubert’s songs, and Die schöne Müllerin has become one of his calling cards. The cycle follows a young miller who sets out full of hope, falls in love, and is undone by jealousy and despair. Goerne’s baritone—dark, weighty, and unhurried—turns the cycle into something closer to opera than recital. At the piano is Daniil Trifonov, already counted among the world’s foremost pianists, whose touch ranges from vapor-light to thunderous without losing control of the song’s architecture. Together, they track the miller’s rise and unravelling, Goerne grounding the text with gravitas, Trifonov giving shape to Schubert’s water imagery and restless modulations. It’s music that feels just right for fall where Schubert’s shifting color seem to reflect the season outside.

Go if: you want to hear a master baritone and a pianist at the height of his powers in one of the great tests of the art song repertoire.

The Composer’s Violinist: Joseph Joachim

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Sun, Oct 19, 5pm

Joseph Joachim was the 19th century’s violinist-in-chief—the player Brahms trusted with his concerto, the muse for Schumann’s late violin sonata, and a close friend of Clara Schumann. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center opens its violin season by retracing that circle: Clara’s tender Three Romances, Robert’s stormy Sonata in D minor for Violin and Piano, Op. 121, Joachim’s own Romance, and Brahms’s lush Sextet No. 2, written when the composer was finally stepping out from under Schumann’s shadow. Stella Chen, Lun Li, and a string team anchored by CMS co-artistic director David Finckel bring the music off the page, with pianist Gilles Vonsattel tying it together.

Go if: you want to hear how one violinist’s presence helped shape some of the most personal and enduring Romantic works.

The Parker Quartet with Jay Campbell

The Crypt, Church of the Intercession, Washington Heights · Tue, Oct 28 & Wed, Oct 29, 7pm & 8:30pm

Death of Classical has made chamber music under candlelight a fixture in the stone crypt of the Church of the Intercession. This season, the Parker Quartet brings cellist Jay Campbell for Schubert’s final completed work, the String Quintet in C Major, which moves from grief to consolation, with a slow movement that still prompts talk of “the gates of heaven.” Heard up close in the subterranean space, the radiance of the music against the dim candlelight is even more pronounced. Two performances each night, each with its own pre-concert reception.

Go if: you want Schubert’s most consuming piece in a space that magnifies its every turn.

The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

Dudamel, Beethoven's Fifth & Corigliano

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Thu Sep 18–Sun, Sep 21

Gustavo Dudamel's first season as Music & Artistic Director Designate pairs two symphonies nearly two centuries apart but circling the same theme. Beethoven's Fifth premiered in Vienna in 1808 and quickly became a beloved work everyone associates with struggle turned into triumphant victory. Dudamel will undoubtedly bring his signature energy to the famous opening four notes, but the real test lies in navigating the symphony's intricate rhythmic architecture and harmonic development with the precision that separates good Beethoven from great Beethoven.

John Corigliano's Symphony No. 1, composed in the late 1980s at the height of the AIDS crisis, operates in similar emotional territory but with devastatingly personal stakes. Corigliano wrote it after losing many close friends including a fellow musician memorialized in the “Tarantella” movement. Where Beethoven wrestled with abstract fate, Corigliano confronted a very real epidemic. Both composers refused to end in defeat, using the symphony format to transform suffering into something transcendent.

Go if: you want to hear how two composers, centuries apart, used the same musical form to wrestle with mortality and find meaning in the struggle.

Anthony Roth Costanzo in Galas

The Amph, Little Island · Sat, Sep 6–Sun, Sep 28

After last summer's extraordinary one-man Marriage of Figaro, Anthony Roth Costanzo returns to Little Island for Charles Ludlam's 1983 camp comedy Galas, about an opera diva whose dramatic personality rivals any role she's played onstage. The character Maria Magdalena Galas is inspired by Maria Callas, the Greek-American soprano known as "La Divina" whose turbulent public image became as legendary as her voice.

Ludlam originally wrote and performed the title role himself for his Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and this time Costanzo brings an exquisite operatic voice, agile in his countertenor range and never lacking power. Eric Ting directs this new production on Little Island's floating amphitheater, with Hudson River breezes and skyline views adding to Ludlam's already outrageous comedy about operatic excess.

Go if: you want to see one of today's most celebrated countertenors tackle a role written about the most famous opera singer of the 20th century.

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Orchestral

Full symphony concerts, chamber orchestras, and large ensemble programs.

The Knights with Wu Man at the Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Upper East Side · Tue, Sep 9, 7pm

Wu Man is basically the reason anyone in the West knows what a pipa is. She's been playing this 2,000-year-old Chinese lute for decades, commissioning new pieces and showing up everywhere from jazz clubs to symphony halls. The pipa looks like a teardrop-shaped guitar but sounds completely different. It can do everything from delicate plucking to these dramatic swooping glissandos that are impossible on Western instruments.

For this performance she's doing Lou Harrison's Pipa Concerto, which he wrote specifically for her back when very few American composers were thinking about Chinese instruments. Harrison was one of those California composers who got really into gamelan and Eastern music in the '70s, so his concerto came from decades of engagement rather than casual borrowing.

The Knights are the ideal ensemble for this piece. They're flexible, adventurous in their repertoire, and skilled at supporting a soloist. Plus, you're hearing this at the Met, which feels appropriately for an instrument with this much history.

Go if: you want to hear an ancient instrument that sounds like nothing else in your music collection.

NY Phil with Gustavo Dudamel & Yunchan Lim

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Thu, Sep 11–Tue, Sep 16, 7:30pm

Yunchan Lim became a classical music phenom after winning the Van Cliburn Competition at 18, and now he's making his NY Phil debut with Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 3. Bartók wrote it while dying of leukemia, and the music moves between tender reflection and fierce determination, giving the sense of someone trying to leave behind a final message. Dudamel, who’s just starting his run with the orchestra, kicks off the evening with a world premiere by Leilehua Lanzilotti, a 2022 Pulitzer finalist, who creates these expansive soundscapes that blend her Hawaiian heritage with experimental techniques. Closing the night is Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 2, composed at the turn of the twentieth century, where he basically samples every American tune he could think of and throws them all together. You'll hear "Camptown Races" next to hymns, next to marching band music, all somehow making sense.

Go if: you're curious about what happens when three very different musical worlds collide on one stage.

American Symphony Orchestra: New York Profiles

Kupferberg Center for the Arts, Flushing · Sun, Sep 14, 3pm · Free

Here’s your chance to hear what American music sounded like as it was taking shape through five mid-century voices. Ulysses Kay’s Joys and Fears was originally part of his score for The Quiet One (1948), a semi-documentary about a young Black boy in Harlem navigating isolation and neglect. Henry Cowell’s Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 10 reimagines colonial hymn singing with off-kilter harmonies. Julia Perry’s A Short Piece for Small Orchestra is the earliest surviving orchestral work by a Black woman composer to be taken up by the New York Philharmonic. It’s compact and restless, built on punchy brass chords, angular string lines, and moments of lyrical contrast. Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite offers his unmistakable wide open textures, and Norman Dello Joio’s New York Profiles closes with a portrait of the city in motion during the 1940s.

Go if: you want to hear how American composers sounded when they were still defining “American” music.

Immersive/Experimental

Cross-genre work, unusual spaces, and concerts that upend expectations.

Pathos Trio: Best in Score 2025

DiMenna Center, Hell’s Kitchen · Sat, Sep 13, 7:30pm

Pathos Trio approaches contemporary classical music like it's time to break some rules. Made up of two percussionists and one pianist, they borrows from metal, electronic synth, and minimalist music to build their unique sound, and this program features seven works that don’t fit squarely in any of those genres. Rafiq Bhatia's Geodes opens the evening, the Son Lux guitarist whose Oscar-nominated Everything Everywhere All At Once score proved film music could be this adventurous.

Phong Tran's Split follows, which the composer flat out calls a "deafening power ballad." The evening's boldest move is Matt Kilbort's arrangement of Toronto’s BADBADNOTGOOD's Can't Leave the Night, stripping the electronics but keeping the mesmerizing pull through acoustic instruments alone. Will Healy, Andrew Rodriguez, and Vicente Hansen Atria round out a program that shows how wide contemporary composition is willing to roam.

Go if: you want to hear chamber music that borrows from everywhere.

Sō Percussion: 25x25 Record Release Party

Le Poisson Rouge, Greenwich Village · Wed, Sep 10, 8pm

Twenty-five years later, Sō Percussion still refuses to play it safe. Their anniversary celebration isn't a greatest hits victory lap but an eight-disc box set of entirely new recordings, because apparently looking backward isn't their thing. The release party digs into the highlights: Jason Treuting and Eric Cha-Beach's own compositions, Vijay Iyer's rhythmically twisted Torque, and Olivier Tarpaga's work that transplants West African drumming onto contemporary percussion setups.

Dan Trueman premieres Machine Listening, which should showcase his bitKlavier—a digital keyboard that plays notes backwards, loops them into rhythmic cycles, and warps tuning in real time. Becca Stevens joins for Caroline Shaw's Grammy-winning Narrow Sea, a song about displacement that resonates deeply when Shaw's delicate harmonies meet Stevens' voice. After all this time proving percussion can do anything, they're still finding new ways to surprise themselves.

Go if: you want to experience boundary-pushing percussion in a venue that fits the music.

TAK Ensemble’s SWOONFEST

DiMenna Center, Hell’s Kitchen · Fri, Sep 12–Sat Sept 13, 6:30-10:30pm

SWOONFEST is a two day festival where experimental music is the main course. At the center is TAK Ensemble, a mixed-quintet that’s become one of the country’s most fearless laboratories for new music. The festival only happens every two years and each time it makes a splash, reminding you how wide and unruly this music really is.

Friday kicks off with gushes, Jennae Santos builds layer after layer of guitar loops until the room feels wrapped in their orbit. RAGE Thormbones take over with subsonic blasts from a pair of trombones that can rattle your ribcage. Then TAK links with Qiujiang Levi Lu, who wires electronics to their own body in a performance that blurs person and machine. Blasé closes the night with a neo-Afro post-punk set built on tightly wound grooves and high energy.

Saturday opens with Yarn/Wire, whose piano and percussion setup locks into patterns that feel mechanical one moment and volatile the next. TAK returns with Victoria Cheah in a work that stretches sound and silence to their limits. Las Mariquitas closes the festival by turning the hall into a salsa floor, their queer and trans collective channeling salsa’s legacy as liberation music into something celebratory.

Go if: you’re ready for music that will push your ears somewhere new.

Telos Consort at MISE-EN_PLACE

MISE-EN_PLACE, Harlem · Sat, Sep 20, 7pm

Telos Consort works a little like a startup, chasing the right way to deliver new classical music to an audience that wants it. Their mix of woodwinds, strings, and piano powers a program of five world premieres. The concert opens with and by opening up by Nathaniel Parks who tends to write from a place of vulnerability. Cole Reyes, co-founder of Telos Consort, borrows freely from pop, rock, and folk in his new piece Arb, which takes inspiration from a Michigan arboretum. Then there’s Keening by Anna Pidgorna who channels Ukrainian folk traditions into contemporary sound. The show takes place at MISE-EN_PLACE, newly resettled in Harlem, a venue dedicated to underrepresented composers and experimental work.

Go if: you want to hear what happens when composers write for an ensemble that doesn’t fit any mold.

11,000 Strings at Park Avenue Armory

Park Avenue Armory, Upper East Side · Tue, Sep 30–Tue, Oct 7

Georg Friedrich Haas looked at the standard 88-key piano and thought, ehh, it’s not enough. So he convinced Park Avenue Armory to give him 50 upright pianos, tune each one in micro-increments to unlock every pitch the human ear can detect, and arrange them around the audience in the Armory’s massive hall.

It's 66 minutes of being enveloped in sound. The Austrian chamber orchestra Klangforum Wien joins the circle around the audience, adding another layer to the abandoned Western tuning experiment. The pianos can create sounds that hover between familiar pitches, producing harmonies that don't exist in normal music. Fair warning: this is not a night of ambient background music, but a full on sensory experience.

Go if: you want your brain's relationship with pitch permanently altered.

Solo and Chamber Music

Smaller forces, tightly curated programs.

Ariel Quartet at Green-Wood Cemetery

Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn · Thu, Sep 4–Sat, Sep 6, 6pm & 7:30pm

Following their extravagant July productions at Printemps and L’Alliance, the Death of Classical returns with another descent into the catacombs of Green-Wood Cemetery. The Ariel Quartet takes on Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14, Op. 131, arguably his most emotionally complex work and at the summit of string quartet music.

Hearing one of Beethoven’s late quartets is always absorbing. Place it underground, and the music he wrote while facing death feels immediate. Each evening starts with an hour of cocktails and charcuterie followed by a twilight stroll to the catacombs, which sounds like something out of a gothic novel, only it happens to be in Brooklyn.

Go if: you want classical music with chills and not just the metaphorical kind.

Earplay: Chamber Music of Richard Festinger

Symphony Space, Upper West Side · Sun, Sep 21, 7pm

Richard Festinger has been shaping American chamber music for more than forty years, yet his work is rarely heard in New York. He started out as a jazz guitarist before turning to composition, and that mix of swing and structure still runs through his catalogue of more than 80 pieces.

The highly admired Jasper String Quartet anchors this program. Festinger’s String Quartet No. 3 moves with a steady undercurrent of tension, harmonies tilting and righting themselves measure by measure. Oboist Noah Kay and pianist Peggy Kampmeier join for Smokin’ with Cocuswood, which brings out some sharp interplay, lines darting around each other in quick flourishes. Soprano Alice Teyssier closes with selections from Letters and the Weather of Six Mornings songs that find stillness in Jane Cooper’s poems.

Go if: you’re up for a night of chamber music and to discover a composer you didn’t realize you’d been missing.

Pene Pati at Park Avenue Armory

Park Avenue Armory, Upper East Side · Wed, Sep 24 7:30pm & Fri, Sep 26, 8pm

Pene Pati is the first Samoan tenor to make it big on Europe's major opera stages, and his voice has that kind of sheen and power that gets people talking. This is his North American solo recital debut where Pati dives off the deep end of art song repertoire: Fauré's sophisticated French melodic lines, Duparc's psychological portraits, Lili Boulanger's tragically brief but brilliant output, and Strauss's orchestral sized piano songs that demand both force and subtlety. The Board of Officers Room at the Armory, all carved wood and 19th-century detail, feels built for this kind of salon style performance.

Go if: you want to hear what happens when top notch vocal technique meets the most sophisticated song literature ever written.

Tania León Celebration at Miller Theatre

Miller Theater, Morningside Heights · Thu, Sep 25, 7:30pm

For decades, Tania León has been one of the defining voices in American classical music and this William Schuman Award concert gives her the recognition she’s long deserved. Her writing carries her Cuban roots into the concert hall with pieces like Tumbao and A La Par weaving in Latin rhythms so naturally. She’s getting help from some serious NYC talent: Claire Chase performing the New York premiere of Singsong for flute, the Bergamot Quartet tackling her string quartet Esencia, and three different pianists handling various solo works. León writes music that sounds contemporary without alienating audiences, which is harder than it looks, and this program spans nearly 40 years of her work.

Go if: you’re curious about a composer whose music keeps opening new doors, even after four decades.

Tamar Sagiv: Shades of Mourning Album Release Concert

National Sawdust, Williamsburg · Thu, Sep 25, 7:30pm

Tamar Sagiv wrote her debut album Shades of Mourning while watching her homeland fall apart. She's a cellist and composer who grew up in Israel but trained classically in the West, and this tension shows up in her music. Traditional Middle Eastern melodies filtered through contemporary classical techniques. The album deals with personal loss, but it's also responding to the ongoing conflicts in her region. Sagiv talks about "the unnatural quiet following destruction" becoming part of her musical language, which gives you a sense of what you're walking into. National Sawdust is befitting for this kind of intimate, heavy material as it's a place where experimental music gets taken seriously.

Go if: You want to hear how someone turns grief into art and you're prepared for music that doesn't shy away from difficult emotions.

Harlem Chamber Players: Iconic Classics

Broadway Presbyterian Church, Harlem · Fri, Sep 26, 7pm

The Harlem Chamber Players know something about making classical music feel like it belongs to everyone. They've been doing it since 2008, starting as a church concert series and growing into one of NYC's most active chamber groups with gigs everywhere from the Apollo to Carnegie Hall. Their season opener starts off with Arvo Pärt's Summa, a gorgeous, meditative piece that feels like it's floating on air. Then David Baker's “Roots II” Piano Trio, a work by the legendary jazz trombonist-turned-composer who founded Indiana University's jazz program and wrote over 2,000 pieces before his death in 2016. The evening closes with Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), the lush, late-Romantic string sextet he wrote at 25 that remains his most beloved piece.

Go if: you want chamber music that feels like a community gathering.

Ekmeles — Another World

DiMenna Center, Hell’s Kitchen · Sat, Sep 27, 7:30pm

The vocal ensemble that pushes the boundaries of what human voices can achieve in pitch is premiering Georg Friedrich Haas's …wie aus einer anderen Welt… (like from another world), a piece that promises all the microtonal wizardry you'd expect from the composer whose in vain was voted the greatest piece of art music since 2000, by Classic Voice magazine. They're pairing it with Peter Ablinger's Studien nach der Natur (Nature Studies), performed in memory of the late composer who turned everyday sounds like highway noise and buzzing mosquitoes into pieces that somehow make sense as concert music.

Go if: you want to hear voices do things that shouldn't be humanly possible.

NY Phil Ensembles at Merkin Hall

Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center, Upper West Side · Sun, Sep 28, 3pm

The New York Philharmonic players are back at Merkin Hall for some delightful chamber music. They're opening with Mozart's Duo for Violin and Viola K.423, which he wrote in 1783 for his friend Michael Haydn (brother of Joseph) who was sick and couldn't finish a commission. It's Mozart basically doing homework for someone else, but it turned out to be one of the best pieces ever written for this combination.

Brahms’ Piano Trio No. 3 comes from his so-called retirement years, opening with this gorgeous, nostalgic theme that transforms throughout the piece, featuring some of his most sophisticated piano writing. Then there's Beethoven's Septet, which was actually his most popular piece during his lifetime, though he got sick of people requesting it. It's early Beethoven, so it's charming and accessible, written for an unusual combo of violin, viola, cello, bass, clarinet, horn, and bassoon that creates this rich, orchestral texture.

Go if: you’re curious to hear Philharmonic players trade the big stage for some up close and personal chamber music.

Opera & Staged Works

Opera classics, new productions, intimate stagings, and anything that tells a story through music and bodies in space.

Celestial Excursions: An Opera by Robert Ashley

Roulette Intermedium, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn · Fri, Sep 12–Sun, Sep 14, 8pm

Robert Ashley’s Celestial Excursions takes the fractured conversations and rule breaking spirit of old people and turns it into a chamber opera. The same stories you’ve heard countless times, anxieties that bubble up mid-sentence, the “I’ll say whatever I want” attitude. Five singers sit at desks with microphones, hardly moving, their spoken and sung lines cutting in and out over a thin layer of vocals and synths. The result is spare, electronic, and unsentimental. While there’s nothing remotely traditional about this staging, it comes off braver than most operas that claim to be about life.

Go if: you want an opera that sounds less like Puccini and more like your grandparents’ conversations.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center · Sun, Sep 21– Sat, Oct 11

Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel makes its leap to the opera stage this fall. Set in New York on the eve of World War II, the story follows two Jewish cousins, Joe Kavalier, an artist who escapes Nazi-occupied Prague, and Sam Clay, a Brooklyn-born writer with big ambitions. They invent an anti-fascist superhero called The Escapist, channeling their own fears and hopes into a comic-book crusader. It’s a story about survival, reinvention, and the power of art at a moment when the world was sliding into war.

Mason Bates scores it with his signature electronics-meets-orchestral writing, Gene Scheer’s libretto moves between occupied Europe, mid-century New York, and the hyper-colored world of the comics, and Bartlett Sher’s staging promises towering sets and projections to match the novel’s scale. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the opening run, with Andrzej Filończyk as Joe and Miles Mykkanen as Sam.

Go if: you want to see what happens when the Great American Novel meets the Great American Opera House.

The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

Music of Exile & Remembrance: Joana Carneiro Conducts Ravel and Prokofiev

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall · Tue, Aug 5 & Wed, Aug 6, 7:30pm

Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro leads the Festival Orchestra through repertoire compelling enough to make you choose a concert hall over a perfect summer evening. Gabriela Lena Frank’s Elegía Andina opens gently with restraint, careful to not oversell itself. Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, Op. 83a follows, which is really his Fourth String Quartet in disguise. Barshai’s masterful orchestral arrangement enriches the emotional intensity until it feels like it might start to splinter.

Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte follows, and despite the mournful title, Ravel himself admitted he just liked how it sounded. More daydream than funeral march. The centerpiece is James Ehnes in Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto, the composer at peak lyricism. He'll give you a gorgeous, singing melody and then throw some harmonic curveballs that keep you from getting too comfortable. Ehnes is genuinely one of the great violinists working today, the kind who makes ridiculously difficult music sound effortless. Hearing this, you get why Prokofiev wrote some of his most impactful music when he was homesick.

Go if: you're in the mood for some beautifully heavy late-Romantic and 20th-century works.

In Sickness and In Health: Jonathon Heyward Conducts the Schumanns

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall · Fri, Aug 8 & Sat, Aug 9, 7:30pm

Jonathon Heyward wraps the Festival Orchestra’s season with a program that puts both Schumanns (Clara and Robert) on equal footing. Robert’s Overture, Scherzo & Finale, opens with newlywed energy still intact, before pianist Yeol Eum Son makes her NYC solo debut with Clara’s F minor Konzertsatz, a piece that’s never gotten a proper New York showcase until now.

James Lee III premieres Connected Perceptions, picking up threads from both Schumanns and layering in his own inspiration from faith and history. Lee writes atmospheric music that gradually builds tension rather than making big, sudden statements. Robert’s Symphony No. 4 in D minor closes, restless and brooding, with Clara's theme woven throughout.

Go if: you want to hear musical partnership as a creative force, not just a romantic trope.

TIME:SPANS Festival — International Contemporary Ensemble

DiMenna Center, Hell’s Kitchen · Fri, Aug 22, 7:30pm

The International Contemporary Ensemble is back with a program that asks, “How weird can we get in one night?” Ashkan Behzadi’s Carnivalesque opens with fractured, percussive bursts across strings and winds. Then Tebogo Monnakgotla’s Wooden Bodies takes the string quartet and runs with it, building from a melancholy viola solo into a restless ball of energy.

Corie Rose Soumah’s Tossed Parachutes of Lilacs and Lungs is a set of five short musical tableaux, each one a personal snapshot. Marcos Balter’s Árvore is another US premiere, written for flute, clarinet, electric guitar, and electronics. It builds a vivid, layered environment around the image of the Tree of Forgetfulness, used in parts of Africa during the transatlantic slave trade to erase memory and identity. Through chant-inspired phrasing and careful interplay between electronics and live instruments, Árvore becomes a meditation on roots, memory, and ancestry.

Thierry Pécou closes with Méditation sur la fin de l’espèce, a cello solo set against recordings of whale song. It’s a stark, heady reflection on extinction.

Go if: you’re curious about where contemporary music is headed and don’t mind a little mental stretch to end your week.

Solo and Chamber Music

Smaller forces, tightly curated programs.

Taka Kigawa Solo Piano Recitals

Bargemusic, DUMBO · Fri, Aug 2, 2pm & 4pm-Sat, Aug 3, 2pm & 4pm

There are the recitals you tell yourself you’ll stay for just one half, then somehow you’re still in your seat 90 minutes—or three hours later. Taka Kigawa’s are like that. He’s landed on The New York Times' best concerts of the year list and has become something of a legend at Le Poisson Rouge for his marathon performances: Pierre Boulez’s complete solo piano works and Olivier Messiaen’s entire Catalogue d’Oiseaux (Catalogue of Birds). What makes this weekend at Bargemusic interesting is seeing someone with that kind of contemporary classical cred turn his focus to the standard rep.

Friday pairs Beethoven's stormy "Tempest" Sonata with Chopin's complete Op. 28 Preludes—core repertoire that sounds completely fresh when played by someone who spends his time unraveling Messiaen. Saturday gets more adventurous with Schumann's Etudes Symphoniques plus Bach’s Chaconne in D minor in Busoni's completely wild piano transcription which asks "what if a piano could do this too?"

Go if: you’re into some masterful solo piano playing with a city view.

Brooklyn Rider: 20 Years at Play

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Sat Aug 9, 7:30pm

For their 20th anniversary, Brooklyn Rider commissioned two composers who treat genres as suggestions: Giovanni Sollima, the Sicilian cellist-composer who blends folk, baroque, and rock into something entirely his own, and Tyshawn Sorey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning multi-instrumentalist whose work refuses categorization between jazz, classical, and experimental music.

Neither piece will fit neatly into traditional chamber music, and Brooklyn Rider thrives on that kind of boundary-pushing. This isn't a "classical" concert in any strict sense, it's chamber music that ventures wherever these composers feel like going.

Go if: you want to hear a quartet that treats comfort zones as things to escape from.

Xuefei Yang, Guitar: What a Wonderful World

New York Society for Ethical Culture, Upper West Side · Sat, Aug 16, 7:30pm

Xuefei Yang has been busy rewriting the classical guitar playbook since she was ten. Growing up in post-Cultural Revolution Beijing when Western instruments were still banned, she became the first guitarist admitted to a Chinese conservatory and basically invented China's modern guitar scene out of necessity. Her early concerts caught the attention of Joaquín Rodrigo and Sir John Williams, who sent her two of his own guitars because decent instruments were impossible to find in Beijing.

Since then, she's played everywhere from Carnegie Hall to the BBC Proms, earning spots on Classic FM's list of top 100 living musicians and BBC Music's top six guitarists of the century. Her "What a Wonderful World" program is a musical passport—flamenco fireworks with Asturias, Parisian café vibes with Satie, a detour through Sakamoto’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and her own Xinjiang Fantasy (Chinese folk melodies in classical guitar arrangements). Then Brazilian sambas, jazz standards, and Spanish classics. Yang plays with a crystalline tone and zero showboating, letting the music tell its own stories.

Go if: you want to hear someone who's made the guitar entirely her own, and you prefer musical journeys over traditional recitals.

Orchestral

Full symphony concerts, chamber orchestras, and large ensemble programs.

Paris to Patagonia: Karen Kamensek Conducts Bizet’s Symphony in C

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Fri, Aug 1–Sat, Aug 2, 7:30pm

Karen Kamensek's "Paris to Patagonia" program may sound like someone's Instagram travel highlights, but hey it works as a through line between the range of pieces for this Festival of Lincoln Center Orchestra concert. The opener Divertissement by Ibert knows exactly how funny it is without being obnoxious, pulled together from his ballet score with all the theatrical timing intact. Soprano Gabriella Reyes performs Britten's Les illuminations, where the composer wrestled Rimbaud's poetry into music that swings between intimate moments to emotional peaks.

Golijov’s Three Songs blend his Argentine roots with influences from everywhere else resulting in dense, almost operatic writing. They’re in good hands with Reyes, whose voice moves easily from finely controlled to full and expansive without ever losing clarity. The surprise closer is Bizet's Symphony in C. Teenage Bizet writing a homage to Mozart with all the harmonic sophistication you'd expect from someone who knew exactly what he was doing at such a young age.

Go if: you want to hear what international programming sounds like when it's done thoughtfully.

East Coast Chamber Orchestra in Central Park

Naumburg Bandshell, Central Park · Tue, Aug 5, 7:30pm · Free

Most nights in Central Park are made for passing through. This one’s worth staying for. East Coast Chamber Orchestra (ECCO) opens their night at the Naumburg Bandshell with Michi Wiancko’s string orchestra arrangement of Bach’s Chaconne in D minor. Normally a solo test of endurance, but reshaped for strings without losing any of its intensity. Then comes Gershwin’s Lullaby for Strings, airy and unhurried, the kind of piece that brings a sense of calm to the city. David Ludwig's Virtuosity closes the first half with five short concertos for each string voice, all connected to the Bach Chaconne that came before.

After intermission, Jennifer Higdon’s String (from her Concerto for Orchestra) brings out a taut, focused energy and John Adams' Shaker Loops closes with early minimalism at its most kinetic, capturing Adams moving away from strict loop and phase music to something more fluid and expressive. It's just the kind of evening of contemplative music your summer deserves.

Go if: you're looking for a reason to slow down and let music be the main event for once.

Immersive/Experimental

Projects that pull from theater, movement, or rethink how a concert works.

The Lights — Matthew Aucoin, Ben Lerner, Roomful of Teeth

The Glade, Little Island · Sat, Aug 2–Sun, Aug 3, 10:00pm

A late night outdoor concert with poetry, strange vocal techniques, and music that actually takes risks. The Lights might be the most polarizing thing happening on Little Island this summer. Composer Matthew Aucoin sets texts by Ben Lerner, with Roomful of Teeth doing the vocal heavy lifting. It could be brilliant. It could be a little too pleased with itself. But either way, it won’t be boring.

Aucoin’s on a strong streak—Music for New Bodies showed he knows how to make language feel alive without turning it into wallpaper. Lerner’s poems, from his new collection The Lights, are made for that kind of treatment. They live in the space between memory and dream, between things that actually happened and things that feel like they could have. And with Roomful of Teeth handling the vocal work, everything gets filtered through their surreal blend of throat singing, yodels, and extended technique.

Go if: you're curious about what happens when serious poetry meets voices that refuse to stay in their lane.

TIME:SPANS Festival — Dal Niente/Beyond This Point: Steen-Andersen

DiMenna Center, Hell’s Kitchen · Sat, Aug 9, 7:30pm

Yes, this one’s out there, but if you’re curious what “experimental classical” means in 2025, this concert nails it. Composer Simon Steen-Andersen brings three of his wildest pieces, with Chicago’s Ensemble Dal Niente and percussion collective Beyond This Point throwing themselves into the chaos.

You get Asthma, where a solo bellows (think: accordion lungs) and a video montage make breathing feel both beautiful and weirdly unsettling. Run Time Error turns a video into a live instrument, complete with joysticks—half video game, half music performance. And Black Box Music is part puppet show, part conductor theater, part straight-up spectacle. It’s physical, funny, and not afraid to get a little unhinged.

Go if: you want to see what happens when a composer actually uses every tool in the shed to mess with your ears and your expectations.

TIME:SPANS Festival— JACK Quartet: World Premiere by Nursalim Yadi Anugerah

DiMenna Center, Hell’s Kitchen · Sun, Aug 10, 7:30pm

JACK Quartet is kicking off their 20th anniversary with a piece that’s half string quartet, half ancient Borneo instrument run by computer. Nursalim Yadi Anugerahm, who rethinks what it means to be a composer, takes the sound of palm oil plantations in Indonesia and turns it into music that feels as tense and industrious as the place itself.

What you get is drones, static, weirdly hypnotic harmonies, and this back-and-forth between the quartet and the kadedek (actually eight of them), an old Kalimantan instrument that gets “played” by the computer. The piece is about ecological mess, culture, and survival. Heavy stuff, but you’ll probably walk out feeling like you’ve just spent an hour somewhere totally new.

Go if: you want to catch what “new music” actually means in 2025—no pretension, just a seriously fresh perspective.

TIME:SPANS Festival — Sixtrum Percussion at DiMenna Center

DiMenna Center, Hell’s Kitchen · Thu, Aug 14 & Sat, Aug 16 · 7:30pm

Two nights, two programs from Sixtrum Percussion, Montreal’s precision-forward sextet known for turning contemporary scores into full-body experiences.

Thursday is percussion in full experimental mode. Ondřej Adámek’s Fishbones opens with twitchy, voice-like textures that grow into metallic roars. Juri Seo’s Shuî, reworked by Sixtrum for six players, is meditative and resonant. Pierre Jodlowski brings two pieces: Mécano 1, where a live metronome becomes part of the action, and 24 Loops, a rotating, build-as-you-go structure that stacks and reshapes itself. The second half is all U.S. premieres from a Quebec trio—Dominic Thibault, Léa Boudreau, and Samuel Bobony—using hydrophones, toys, real-time sampling, and wind-like textures to turn percussion into something immersive, playful, and just a little comical.

Saturday shifts toward resonance and repetition. Jennifer Higdon’s Splendid Wood opens with six marimbas in sync. Éric Champagne’s Onde de choc surges with clusters and strict pulse, while Jordan Nobles’ Still Life changes the temperature with a slow, suspended piece where time feels stretched thin. Then comes Pemoengkah, a Balinese ceremonial work via Colin McPhee and arranged for percussion ensemble by Sixtrum’s own Fabrice Marandola. The night ends with Steve Reich’s Six Marimbas, a classic of minimalism where a single groove slowly twists and resets until you're not sure where the changes started.

Go if: you want to hear how much ground six percussionists can cover in two nights.

TIME:SPANS Festival — Bozzini Quartet

DiMenna Center, Hell’s Kitchen · Fri, Aug 15, 7:30pm

Plenty of groups play new music. Bozzini Quartet makes a life inside it. For two decades, they’ve taken on scores other ensembles would pass over, not just performing them, but learning the ins and outs, building trust with composers, and letting the strange parts stay strange.

For their TIME:SPANS performance, they take on three premieres from Canadian composers with distinct voices. Cassandra Miller’s Three Songs starts with old folk and campfire tunes, sung by the quartet, then slowly loops and stretches them into something quieter and more internal. Taylor Brook’s Vinetan Songs imagines the music of a lost city, blending together real traditions with invented forms to create a folklore for a place that never was. Zosha Di Castri’s Delve pushes the quartet’s sound through leather, rubber, and metal mutes, gradually building pressure until the music breaks open.

Go if: you’re looking for chamber music that feels genuinely new.

Mastery in Motion: An Evening of Guitar Artistry

Christ & St. Stephen’s Church, Upper West Side · Sat, Aug 16, 7:00pm

This is not your neighbor’s solo guitar night. Tribeca New Music and the Alternative Guitar Summit team up for this one night only set with Wolfgang Muthspiel, Fareed Haque, Dan Lippel, and Joel Harrison. Muthspiel—a longtime ECM artist known for that not-quite-jazz, not-quite-classical in-between—gives the U.S. premiere of his Etudes/Quietudes, a set of solo pieces with just enough left turns to keep you totally absorbed.

Haque brings unmatched technical range and a playlist that might bounce from raga to funk to straight-ahead jazz without warning. Lippel, a fixture in the new music scene, brings both clarity and subtlety to Harrison’s duo pieces from his Guitar Talk Vol. 2: Jazz Duos album. Harrison ties it all together, contributing new duo works and plugging in for some electric pieces that don’t bother moving between different styles.

Go if: you want to hear guitar music that isn’t boxed in by tradition or if you want to be surprised by what the instrument can do when nobody’s playing it safe.

TIME:SPANS Festival — Talea Ensemble

DiMenna Center, Hell’s Kitchen · Tue, Aug 19, 7:30pm

Claire Chase joins the Talea Ensemble for the U.S. premiere of Chaya Czernowin’s the divine thawing of the core, a sprawling new work for contrabass flute and an ensemble of six flutes, six oboes, six trumpets, low brass, piano, percussion, and three cellos.

The work was composed while Czernowin was in Barcelona, influenced structurally by Gaudí’s Sagrada Família. Its title and emotional weight reflect her response to political events unfolding in her native Israel, which she refers to as “This forced thawing of a democratic society into a theocracy under the guise of the Jewish divinity (and supremacy) is deeply painful to any person who believes in humanity.” She emphasizes this is not a political piece, but one written from pain and an attempt to grapple with the ongoing, incomprehensible reality.

Claire Chase performs on the towering contrabass flute, an instrument central to the work’s sonic world. Talea Ensemble, led by James Baker, realizes the dense, carefully shaped score with the control and responsiveness it requires.

Go if: you're ready for music that treats sound as substance and doesn’t look away from the world around it.

TIME:SPANS Festival — Endlings, Yarn/Wire

DiMenna Center, Hell’s Kitchen · Thu, Aug 21, 7:30pm

For years, Endlings—Raven Chacon and John Dieterich—have worked in the studio, building an intentionally unstable soundworld rooted in anti-permanence, anti-authorship, and the raw energy of stressed materials. With False Division, they bring that language into live performance for the first time, teaming up with the fearless piano/percussion quartet Yarn/Wire.

Yarn/Wire’s finely tuned piano and percussion setup meets Endlings’ chaotic electronics in a space where nothing is fixed. The music is improvised but highly reactive—more process than product, constantly being made and unmade on the spot.

Go if: you want to hear what real musical unpredictability feels like.

The Concerts

Top Picks

What I’d prioritize if you’re only seeing one or two concerts this month.

Midsummer Musicfest: Bell-Isserlis-Denk Trio & Friends

The 92nd Street Y, New York, Upper East Side · Wed, July 9 & Sat, July 12, 7:30pm

Three major solo artists—violinist Joshua Bell, cellist Steven Isserlis, and pianist Jeremy Denk—reunite for their first New York performance together in six years with an all-Fauré program that's been selling out everywhere from London's Wigmore Hall to Aspen.

On July 9, the evening moves from duos to full quintet, where Fauré specialists violinist Irène Duval and violist Blythe Teh Engstroem join for the brooding Piano Quintet in D Minor. The program opens with the elegant Violin Sonata in A Major, gives Denk a solo moment with the hypnotic Barcarolle No. 5, and closes the evening with all five musicians weaving through Fauré's Piano Quintet No. 1 in D Minor.

For July 12, the program shifts completely. Denk plays the austere Nocturne No. 13. Bell joins Duval, Engstroem, and Isserlis for the composer’s final work, the rarely performed String Quartet in E Minor. Isserlis and Denk offer two compact, lyrical works for cello and piano—Romance and Élégie—before the night ends with the darker, more concentrated Piano Quintet No. 2 in C Minor.

Go if: You want to hear what happens when three of the best musicians alive and their friends decide to dig deep into one composer together.

Versailles in Printemps: The Versailles Royal Opera Orchestra

Printemps New York, Financial District · Mon, July 21, 7:00pm

Death of Classical brings the Versailles Royal Opera Orchestra to New York for the first time, but they're skipping the concert hall. Instead, you'll wander through the new Printemps retail space at One Wall Street while the orchestra performs and actors recreate the Affair of the Poisons—that notorious scandal involving Louis XIV's court, black masses, and murder plots against the king's mistress.

Founder and Artistic Director Andrew Ousley designed this as an immersive experience where you move between spaces, encountering performances while sampling food from James Beard Award-winning chef Gregory Gourdet and curated wines and cocktails. Period costume encouraged, which means this is either going to be brilliantly theatrical or completely over the top. Likely both.

Go if: You're more interested in performance as an immersive experience than staying in your seat. This is for people who want live music that doesn't stay onstage.

Versailles at L'Alliance: The Versailles Royal Opera Orchestra

L'Alliance, Lenox Hill · Wed, July 23, 6:30pm

If you miss the Versailles Orchestra at Printemps earlier in the week, this second appearance offers a completely different kind of evening, more buttoned-up without the costumes, but no less extravagant. Death of Classical brings them to L’Alliance on East 60th Street, a former Gilded Age mansion turned French cultural center.

Countertenor Franco Fagioli makes his North American debut here, in a program called Arias for Velluti, the Last Castrato, built around 19th-century works written for the rarest of voices. And if you opt for the “Louis XIV Experience” ticket, your night keeps going with wine, music, and a salon-style gathering at Freeman’s auction house a short walk away. An intriguing night of music that goes all-in on the opulence without taking itself too seriously.

Go if: You want music that feels like it's being performed in someone's private salon and you're up for an evening that keeps going after the final note.

The Woods by San Fermin & BalletCollective

Pioneer Works, Red Hook, Brooklyn · Thu, Jul 31-Sat, Aug 2, 8:00pm

The vast industrial space of Pioneer Works becomes a living stage where 17 dancers and singers move through the audience while musicians from the band San Fermin play from different corners of the room. Composer and bandleader Ellis Ludwig-Leone and choreographer Troy Schumacher have designed this as a 360-degree immersive experience. You're not watching from a seat, you're inside it for 75 minutes.

The set is a fractured white frame hiding something alive and blood red underneath with a simple premise: the woods as a gathering place for people working through change. The music draws from San Fermin's indie pop roots—think somewhere between Grizzly Bear and Sufjan Stevens—with laidback melodies woven with orchestral textures that feel naturally part of the songwriting, not just for decoration. This is most definitely not background music for wandering, it's material that asks you to stay present while bodies and melodies move through your personal space.

Go if: You're up for an immersive experience that blends music and dance in a way that makes you feel like you're part of the magic.

Opera & Staged Works

Opera classics, new productions, intimate stagings, and anything that tells a story through music and bodies in space.

Tango-Opera: Euridice, una sombra

La MaMa, East Village · Wed, Jul 2, 7:00pm · Free

It may have seemed like an outside shot taking Gluck's pristine opera and setting it in a 1930s Buenos Aires brothel, but director Mariana Ciolfi knows what she's doing. She keeps the gorgeous arias that make Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice work, but swaps out the formal recitatives for texts by actual tango poets who understood the intricacies between love and violence.

The bandoneon and guitars give the music a completely different feel, making Orpheus's journey into the underworld sound like something that could happen after midnight in any city where close dancing and passion runs deep. María Victoria Gaeta and Nacha Nocetti don't perform these roles so much as inhabit them, and the carnival setting isn't just pretty backdrop, it's where the whole story gets its teeth. This is opera that bites.

Go if: You're curious what opera sounds like when it's stripped of formality and rebuilt with the emotional directness of Tango.

Rome is Falling

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Sun, July 13, 8:00pm

Doug Balliett’s Rome is Falling turns the collapse of the Roman Empire into a high octane, all ages opera filled with lollipops, an emperor with a chicken fetish, and a cast that seems to multiply by the minute. Beneath all the absurdity though is look at how power unravels, through fear, ambition, and betrayal in ways that feel eerily familiar. American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*) handles it with their usual mix of precision and mischief, with Reggie Mobley, Ariadne Greif, and the Young People’s Chorus of NYC leading the charge. It’s ridiculous and that’s the point.

Go If: You want to laugh at the fall of an empire while realizing it hits a little too close to home.

Teatro Grattacielo: L'Amico Fritz

La MaMa, East Village · Sat, July 19, 6:00pm & Sun, July 20, 4:00pm

Most opera companies can get stuck putting on the same five operas, but Teatro Grattacielo doesn’t want to fall into the same trap. They're doing Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz instead of his famous Cavalleria Rusticana, basically choosing the good B-side over the mega hit.

The story's simple: confirmed bachelor falls for his tenant's daughter. But Mascagni wrote music that's way more psychologically complex than this basic plot deserves, and director Anna Laura Miszerak gets that completely. She's focusing on subtext and gestures instead of big arias, with two different sopranos splitting the lead role across the weekend. The cast is all emerging artists, and in La MaMa's 74-seat space you can catch every expression, which works perfectly for this kind of intimate storytelling.

Go if: You like discovering overlooked gems and appreciate emotional subtlety over vocal fireworks.

Teatro Grattacielo: Le Nozze di Figaro

La MaMa, East Village · Fri, July 25–Sun, July 27

If you've ever wished opera would drop the pomp and just tell a good story, this is one to catch. Figaro is already a tight, funny, subversive piece—servants outwitting aristocrats the year before the French Revolution—but Teatro Grattacielo is giving it just the right kind of pressure-cooker treatment.

They’re staging it at East Village’s La MaMa, which is basically a small theater with no space to hide. That means everything has to work harder: the singing, the staging, the ideas. They’ve even brought back some lines from the original play by Beaumarchais, so expect a little more punch in the storytelling. With emerging artists rotating major roles across three nights, you’re watching singers throw themselves in headfirst. It’s sharp, fast (2 hours 25 minutes with a break), and you’ll be out in time to argue about it over dinner.

Go if: You want a downtown alternative to a night at the opera.

Chamber Music

Smaller forces, tightly curated programs.

Summer Evenings II Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Sat, July 12, 5:00pm

Ten years in, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's Summer Evenings series has evolved to the point where tickets get snapped up so fast they need a lottery system. This night in particular centers on string quintets with two violas. Unusual, yes, but that second viola thickens the middle register, giving everything a little more warmth and heft than usual.

Purcell's Fantasia Upon One Note does exactly what the title promises. Mozart's early Quintet in B-flat Major K. 174 offers a peek at a teenage composer trying things out. Beethoven's Duet in E-flat major for viola and cello follows, complete with the cheeky subtitle "With Two Eyeglasses Obbligato.” Then comes the sprint finish: Mendelssohn's first quintet tightens the pace sending the drama into high gear. Stick around afterward for wine in the lobby and a chance to talk with the musicians.

Go if: You want to sink into your seat on a Saturday evening and hear what happens when great musicians dig into repertoire they know inside and out.

Sandbox Percussion Summer Seminar Opening/Closing Concerts

The New School, Greenwich Village · Wed, July 16, 7:00pm & Tue, July 22, 1:00pm

Sandbox Percussion’s Summer Seminar hits its tenth year this July, and they’re throwing two free concerts to show what a week of brainy, athletic chamber music looks like up close. The first, on July 16, is the kind of opening night set that lets you hear the ensemble at full tilt before handing things over to the seminar participants for the closing concert. The second, on July 22, is the big one: a full performance of Andy Akiho’s Seven Pillars and Portal, with players from the seminar joining Sandbox and Akiho himself, who just joined the composition faculty at The New School. If you’ve never been to a percussion concert where the players are front and center, not tucked in the back of the orchestra, this is your excuse.

Go if: You want to hear what percussion can do when it’s not stuck in the back of the orchestra. One night to watch the pros go hard, and one to hear what they’ve passed on.

Summer Evenings VI Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Sat, July 26, 5:00pm

CMS knows the formula: great players, classic repertoire, and wine in the lobby after. The Viano Quartet is playing four works that cover a lot of emotional ground. Haydn's D Minor Quartet is his final quartet, unfinished but still full of fire. Mozart's G Major Quartet starts warm and orderly, then slowly unspools into something more intricate, before a finale that spins a five note idea into something monumental. Mendelssohn's standalone fugue is dense but light on its feet, and Schumann's A major closes the night with long lyrical phrases that feel like conversation. Free tickets through the TodayTix lottery means you either get lucky or you don't, but the 5pm start time is great for dinner plans afterward.

Go if: You're ready for two hours of beautiful music and then wine while you process what you just heard.

Orchestral

Full symphony concerts, chamber orchestras, and large ensemble programs.

Symphony of Choice: A Crowd-Composed Concert

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Sat, July 19 7:30pm

At this concert, the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center hands the setlist to the crowd. You’ll vote by text on what gets played next—Brahms, Beethoven, or maybe something new. Conductor Jonathon Heyward keeps the whole thing from tipping into chaos. Some will call it a gimmick. Others might say it’s long overdue. Either way, it’s a chance to hear a concert shaped in the present moment in one of the most acoustically rewarding rooms in the city.

Go if: You’re game for a choose-your-own-adventure orchestral experience.

Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center: Folklore & Legends

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Tue, July 22 & Wed, July 23, 7:30pm

Lincoln Center's summer orchestra has gotten a purposeful rebrand (goodbye Mostly Mozart, hello Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center), and the programming feels genuinely refreshed. This "Folklore & Legends" program seems suited for people who think classical music isn't for them: Emilie Mayer's stormy Faust Overture, Anna Clyne's Glasslands featuring saxophonist Jess Gillam channeling Irish banshees, and Brahms's monumental First Symphony to anchor everything.

At the podium is Jonathon Heyward, fresh off his appointment in Baltimore and one of the most talked-about conductors of his generation. He’s unafraid to rethink the format, bringing an open-door energy that invites in anyone willing to listen. Tickets start at just $5, with a suggested $35, a welcome move for anyone curious but not ready to commit to a full-price night at Lincoln Center.

Go if: You want to see what the future of orchestras might look like, led by a conductor who cares as much about community as he does about Brahms.

Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center: Timeless Transformation

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Fri, July 25 & Sat, July 26, 7:30pm

Watching Dame Jane Glover conducting Mozart is like having someone who's made Mozart her life's work finally get to show you why she's obsessed. The evening kicks off with Michael Abels's More Seasons, a modern piece that’s not too modern. Then, Sterling Elliott takes the stage for Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations. He plays with a kind of warmth and ease that makes the hard stuff feel natural, and he’s already worked with just about every major orchestra in the country, and the momentum behind him keeps building.

Then, the Mozart side: The spirited Allegro assai from Mozart's Symphony No. 33 kicks off the second half and the closer is Act I of Mozart's Zaide, a "Singspiel" that's opera you can actually follow, featuring some of the best young talent from the Met's artist program. This is the kind of evening that reminds you why Mozart endures, played by musicians who get what they're doing.

Go if: You want to experience Mozart conducted by someone who has been immersed in his music longer than you've been alive.

Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center: The Beethoven Effect

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center · Tue, July 29–Wed, July 30, 7:30pm

So what exactly is "The Beethoven Effect"? Judging by this program, I would guess it’s the way his music keeps pulling composers into his orbit centuries later. Conductor Jonathon Heyward has built an evening around that gravitational pull, opening with Iman Habibi's Jeder Baum spricht—a piece written in dialogue with Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth symphonies while throwing in some thoughts on nature and climate.

Then there's Louise Farrenc's 1834 Overture No. 1, written back when Beethoven's influence was still fresh and exciting. The man himself gets the second half: his Triple Concerto with soloists drawn from the orchestra's own ranks, followed by the Seventh Symphony, the one that makes you understand why people called Beethoven revolutionary. It's a promising lineup for an orchestra charting new territory in a post-Mostly Mozart era.

Go if: You're up for a night of classic Beethoven with a few pieces that make you think.

Immersive/Experimental

Projects that pull from theater, movement, or rethink how a concert works.

the echoing of tenses

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center · Wed, July 16, 7:30pm

American Modern Opera Company doesn’t do small and they’re closing their Run AMOC* Festival at Lincoln Center with one of their most expansive projects yet. the echoing of tenses, a new song cycle by composer Anthony Cheung, brings together tenor Paul Appleby, violinist Miranda Cuckson, pre-recorded sounds, and texts by seven Asian American poets—Victoria Chang, Arthur Sze, Jenny Xie, Monica Youn, and others—who will perform their own words live onstage.

So, not just poetry set to music, but in the music, unfolding alongside it with themes like memory, migration, and family refracted across voice, violin, and tape. It could feel like a lot. It’s supposed to. But that kind of overload is what AMOC* does best.

Go if: You want to experience something experimental where literature and music collide.

Outdoor & Open-Air

Music you can hear outside this month, from parks and plazas to waterfronts and rooftops.

Carnegie Hall Citywide: Catalyst Quartet

Bryant Park, Midtown · Wed, July 23, 6:00pm · Free

Most outdoor classical shows can be background music for picnics, but the Catalyst Quartet is trying something different here. These Grammy winners are taking songs you know from Joni Mitchell to Pete Seeger, and seeing if they work as serious chamber music. The program also includes "Autumn Leaves" arranged by Takemitsu, their own arrangements of "Both Sides Now", "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," and Piazzolla's Angel Suite to extend beyond the hits. Their UNCOVERED project proved they understand how to program smart and this free Bryant Park gig lets you test their theory while enjoying the summer evening.

Go if: You want to hear Joni Mitchell and Pete Seeger reimagined as chamber music.

Sugar Hill Salon Live at Jackie Robinson Park

Jackie Robinson Park, Harlem · Fri, July 25, 7:00pm · Free

Imani Winds—the Grammy-winning quintet that's been reshaping what wind chamber music can sound like for over two decades—joins forces with Sugar Hill Salon for a free outdoor concert in Harlem. Sugar Hill Salon founder Alexander Davis started this series in his Harlem dining room during 2020, convinced that chamber music is where social justice work can actually happen in classical music.

The collective puts Black and brown woodwind artists at the center, commissioning new work that reflects the communities it plays for, rather than circling the same old canon. Flutist Brandon Patrick George joins Imani for the night, bringing together musicians who've all made careers out of expanding what wind chamber music can be.

Go if: You're down for world class chamber music outdoors and want to back a local series that’s building something real.

Correction: For Midsummer Musicfest: Bell–Isserlis–Denk Trio & Friends, the July 12 concert features a different Fauré program than the one described above and in the email, which detailed only the July 9 performance. On July 12, the group performs the Violin Sonata No. 2 in E Minor, Nocturne No. 13, Romance, Élégie, the String Quartet in E Minor, and the Piano Quintet No. 2 in C Minor.

This guide doesn't list every concert happening this summer, but focuses on the festivals that stand out for their setting, programming, or the kind of evening that makes you remember why you love live music. Whether you're thinking about a day trip to the Hudson Valley or plotting a weekend in Vermont, these are the festivals worth your time.

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The Institutions

The festivals with serious history and cultural weight. These are places that have shaped classical music for decades.

Tanglewood

Lenox, MA · June 21–August 31

Tanglewood is a tradition. The summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for nearly a century and the place where generations of New Yorkers have made their annual pilgrimage to the Berkshires. It's not just the music that makes it memorable, but the feeling of hearing the BSO in the open-air Koussevitzky Shed, the sound carrying out over lawn and into the hills. It gives you the sense that you're somewhere with history and a lot of space to think.

I spent a summer here in high school. What I remember most vividly is sitting behind the Tanglewood Music Center orchestra in Ozawa Hall watching the conducting fellows pour themselves completely into the all-Sibelius program. You could feel the whole orchestra feeding off their energy. Then a few nights later, the BSO playing Tchaikovsky's unsparing Symphony No. 6, the final notes quietly dissolving into nothing. That’s when it clicked for me.

This year, Andris Nelsons leads much of the season, joined by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Elim Chan, and Zubin Mehta. Soloists include Yuja Wang, María Dueñas, and Emanuel Ax. Go for the big orchestral pieces, but also make room for the chamber concerts, premieres, and student performances that sometimes outshine the headliners.

The Berkshire Flyer runs direct from Moynihan Station if you don't want to deal with weekend traffic.

ODEA Picks:

• Sat, Jul 5 - All-Rachmaninoff Program with Daniil Trifonov

• Mon, Jul 7 TMC Orchestra performs Brahms & Smetana

• Sun Jul 13 - Thomas Adès conducts Sibelius

• Mon, Jul 14 - TMC Orchestra Performs Ravel & Stravinsky

• Sun, Jul 20 - Symphonie fantastique and Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 2 with Yuja Wang

• Fri, Jul 25 - Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with María Dueñas

• Sat, Jul 26 - Mahler Symphony No. 1 and John Williams Piano Concerto with Emanuel Ax

• Sat, Aug 2 - Elim Chan Conducts Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2 and Korngold Violin Concerto with Leonidas Kavakos

• Mon, Aug 4 - Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra Performs Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges

Ideal For: Big Symphony Fans, Chamber Music Enthusiasts, Summer in the Berkshires, Weekend Trips.

Venue Notes: Concerts take place across Tanglewood’s relaxed, 500-acre campus in the Berkshires. Big nights happen in the open-air Koussevitzky Music Shed, while chamber and student performances are usually in Seiji Ozawa Hall, known for its clean acoustics and back wall that opens to the lawn. Bring a blanket. Lawn seating is a big part of the experience.

The Glimmerglass Festival

Cooperstown, NY · July 7–August 17

Glimmerglass is where classic operas and new stories get equal space, and where a summer day can include both a swim and a world premiere. This season includes a visually striking Tosca directed by Louisa Proske, the company’s first take on The Rake’s Progress, Stravinsky’s sharp edged parable of ambition and ruin, and the world premiere of The House on Mango Street, adapted by Sandra Cisneros herself with a nimble, episodic score by Derek Bermel. They’re also bringing back Odyssey, fast moving, one-hour opera for all ages that somehow fits in gods, monsters, and a surprisingly tender ending before attention spans run out.

ODEA Picks:

• Tosca (10 performances: Jul 11–Aug 16)
  Puccini’s opera of love, betrayal, and revolution. Directed by Louisa Proske, with sets by John Conklin.

• The House on Mango Street (World premiere: Jul 18–Aug 16)
  Sandra Cisneros’s coming-of-age classic becomes a series of musical vignettes. Quietly powerful, vividly told. Music by Derek Bermel and libretto by Cisneros and Bermel.

• The Rake’s Progress (Company premiere: Jul 19–Aug 15)
  Stravinsky's neoclassical opera gets a new staging by Eric Sean Fogel that puts choreography front and center. It's part satire, part cautionary tale about what happens when you let your worst impulses take the wheel.

• Odyssey (Aug 3, 5, 8)
  Homer's epic condensed to one hour with resident artists and local kids. The mythical singing creatures who lure sailors to their doom remain the highlight.

Ideal For: Opera Enthusiasts, Literary Types, Lakeside Culture Seekers.

Venue Notes: The Alice Busch Opera Theater is a sleek, airy space tucked into a field outside Cooperstown. Ventilation is natural (read: bring layers), acoustics are excellent, and you’re never far from a lake view.

Saratoga Performing Arts Center

Saratoga Springs, NY · June 15–August 23

SPAC is where serious music goes to summer. The Philadelphia Orchestra and Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center set up residencies in this massive park preserve surrounded by hiking trails, geysers, and natural mineral springs.

In August, the Philadelphia Orchestra returns with Yannick Nézet-Séguin for a stretch that includes Verdi’s Requiem and Stravinsky’s Suite from The Firebird. Marin Alsop opens the residency with a all-Tchaikovsky night, with Holst’s The Planets and a Gershwin & Bernstein program rounding out the next two evenings. You’ll also hear Laufey singing jazz ballads, Renée Fleming in her nature-focused program, and Cynthia Erivo with selections that pull from Broadway and soul.

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center handles the more intimate side of the season with Sunday afternoon concerts at the nearby Spa Little Theater. The programs are very much core canon (Beethoven, Dvořák, Brahms), with string quartets, piano trios, and wind quintets played by musicians who know how to keep familiar music sounding fresh.

ODEA Picks:

• Sun, Jun 20 - Beethoven’s Quintet for Piano and Winds

• Wed, Aug 6 - Tchaikovsky Spectacular

• Sat, Aug 9 - Laufey: A Night at the Symphony with The Philadelphia Orchestra

• Sun, Aug 10 - The Viano String Quartet

• Wed, Aug 13 - Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff & Still

• Fri, Aug 15 - Renée Fleming with The Philadelphia Orchestra

• Wed, Aug 20 - Beethoven’s Fifth

• Fri, Aug 22 - An Evening with Cynthia Erivo & The Philadelphia Orchestra

Ideal For: A Weekend Getaway, Big Night Out, Adventurous Listeners.

Venue Notes: SPAC’s main amphitheater is built for big sound. Surrounded by pines with lawn space that makes for a great picnic. Just down the path, the Spa Little Theater is the opposite: enclosed, low-lit, and tuned for chamber music.

Norfolk Chamber Music Festival

Norfolk, CT · July 4–August 16

This has been Yale School of Music's summer program since 1941, bringing chamber music to a wooden "Music Shed" that looks more like a town hall than a concert hall, but that's part of the charm. The acoustics are immaculate (cedar and redwood will do that) and the festival’s programs strike a balance: grounded in the canon (think Beethoven, Hadyn, Schubert), but often paired with more modern pieces. One night you’ll hear a Timo Andres string quartet slipped between Haydn and Dvořák, or Osvaldo Golijov’s mystical Dreams and Prayers setting up Beethoven’s transcendent String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132.

Some Friday concerts include Dialogues, with Yale professors leading pre-show conversation in nearby Battell Recital Hall. Whether or not you're there for the musicology, it’s the music that counts. The lineup shifts weekly, so check the schedule and pick your weekend wisely.

ODEA Picks:

• Fri, Jul 4 – Dialogues: Celebrating America: Copland’s Appalachian Spring and more

• Sat, Jul 5 – Brentano Quartet: Schubert, Webern, Beethoven

• Sat, Jul 12 – Brentano Quartet: Haydn, Timo Andres, Dvořák

• Fri, Jul 18 – Dialogues: Music & Hollywood: Classical meets the silver screen

• Sat, Jul 19 – Miró Quartet with Romie de Guise-Langlois & Melvin Chen: Beethoven, Golijov, Prokofiev

• Fri, Jul 25 – Miró Quartet: Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor and more

• Sat, Jul 26 – Dialogues: Tradition & Innovation: Saint-Saëns to Valerie Coleman

• Fri, Aug 1 – Shanghai Quartet: Beethoven, Zhou Long, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden

• Fri, Aug 8 – Dialogues: Night in an Early 1800s Concert Hall: A time-travel concert experience

Ideal For: A Weekend Trip, Chamber Music Devotees.

Venue Notes: Concerts take place in the historic all-wood Music Shed, built from cedar and redwood and prized for its near-perfect acoustics. It’s not flashy, but the sound is the draw and it delivers.

The Discoveries

Intimate venues where the music feels more personal and the programming takes real risks.

Marlboro Music Festival

Marlboro, VT · July 19–August 17

In the hills of southern Vermont, Marlboro is less summer festival and more creative retreat. For seven weeks, established artists like Mitsuko Uchida and Jonathan Biss live, rehearse, and eat alongside early-career players, with no agenda beyond making music worth sharing. Programs aren’t announced until just before each concert. They emerge from weeks of quiet, obsessive rehearsal. When audiences finally gather in the plain wooden hall, it feels more like overhearing something personal than attending a show. Just deep listening in a place where the work is what matters.

Ideal For: Chamber aficionados craving the real deal, and anyone who needs proof that genuine artistic community still exists.

Venue Notes: Performances in the modest Persons Auditorium, where the world's elite musicians play as if no one's watching (though everyone definitely is).

Yellow Barn Music Festival

Putney, VT · June 22–August 9

Yellow Barn turns the quiet town of Putney into a four-week chamber music lab every summer. The performances take place in a post-and-beam barn just off Main Street. Think yellow pine, steep balcony, great acoustics, and the occasional creak. Small enough where you’re never too far from the action.

The concerts here are marathon affairs—seven or eight pieces that actually justify the ticket price and the programming doesn’t play it safe. You'll get Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 sandwiched between Brett Dean's contemporary Approach and Mauricio Kagel's theatrical Osten, which tells you how seriously they take both old and new music. Intermissions come with ice cream and blueberries, because apparently someone finally figured out what classical music was missing all along.

ODEA Picks:

• Fri, Jul 11 - Opening Night: Rachmaninoff, Bach, Beethoven.

• Thu, Jul 17 - Festival Concert: Mozart, Aperghis, Nono, Pais, Tulve (free admission)

• Jul 18: Verklärte Nacht and Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time - basically the heavyweight bout of the festival.

• Sat, Jul 26 - Schubert, Virgil Thompson, Korngold and Ives.

• Tue, Jul 29 - Schumann, Hollinger, Strauss, Brahms

• Thu, Jul 31 - Stravinsky’s Duo Concertant, Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 47

• Mon, Aug 4 - Haydn’s String Quartet in F Minor, Op.20 No.5, Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, Op.132

• Fri, Aug 8 - Anderson’s String Quartet No. 3, Mozart’s String Quintet in D Major, K.593, Schubert’s Octet in F Major, D. 803

• Sat, Aug 9 - Season finale includes Dvořák’s String Quartet in G Major, Op. 106, Fauré’s Violin Sonata No. 2 in E Minor, and a final course of Anderson’s Tiramisù

Ideal For: A Weekend Trip, Contemporary Music Explorers, Chamber music fans who don’t need headliners.

Venue Notes: Performances happen in a rustic-chic barn with warm, resonant acoustics. It seats about 125, and small enough to catch every expression.

Opera Saratoga

Saratoga Springs, NY · June 20–28

This is one of the smallest opera festivals in the region, and that’s part of the appeal. Opera Saratoga keeps the season short, performs everything in one downtown venue, and isn’t afraid to throw something strange on the bill. This summer opens with La Vie parisienne, Offenbach’s 1866 fast moving operetta that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The production is sung in French with new English dialogue, and it plays more like a cartoon than anything you'd expect from an opera company.

Also in the mix is A Mass for Women in Bathrooms, a new work-in-progress from Irish composer Emma O’Halloran and librettist Naomi Louisa O’Connell. It’s built around the format of a Catholic mass but staged like a domestic standoff, as a mother and her three daughters hash out faith, fertility, and family history from inside a bathroom. Think more sketchbook than final product for this production, but the ideas are bold and personal.

ODEA Picks:

• La Vie parisienne (Jun 20, 22, 26, 28)

• A Mass for Women in Bathrooms (Jun 22, 27)

Ideal For: Opera Enthusiasts, Upstate Weekenders.

Venue Notes: Universal Preservation Hall is a restored 19th-century church with vaulted ceilings and excellent acoustics. Intimate, atmospheric, and just a few blocks from downtown Saratoga eats.

Maverick Concerts

Woodstock, NY · June 29–September 14

Maverick Concerts, held June through September in a century-old barn deep in the Woodstock woods, offers chamber music with a laid-back feel.

The programming here doesn't look like every other summer festival’s. Take the Pacifica Quartet in July, they’ll start with Mendelssohn’s A Minor Quartet, full of tension, counterpoint, and strange fugue patterns, then jump to Bartók’s tightly wound String Quartet No. 4 , and close with Dvořák’s lyrical American Quartet. It's the kind of sequence that makes you hear familiar pieces differently. Or take the Dalí Quartet lining up Reynaldo Hahn’s quartet with Eleanor Alberga's restless String Quartet No. 1 before letting Tchaikovsky’s First Quartet wrap things up. These aren’t safe picks. They’re deliberate, contrasted programs that trust listeners to follow where the music leads.

ODEA Picks:

• Sun, Jul 6 - Manhattan Chamber Players and Mariam Adam, clarinet

• Sun, Jul 13 - Miró Quartet

• Sat, Jul 19 - Adam Tendler, piano

• Sun, Jul 20 - Pacifica Quartet

• Sat, Aug 23 - Maverick Chamber Orchestra Concert

• Sun, Aug 31 - The Dalí Quartet, Mayumi Tsuchida

• Sun, Sep 7 - Borromeo String Quartet, Michael Stephen Brown

Ideal For: Upstate Weekenders, Curious Listeners, Contemporary Music Enthusiasts.

Venue Notes: Performances take place in the historic wooden concert barn built in 1916, with seating that puts you close enough to see the sheet music.

Kingston Chamber Music Festival

Kingston, RI · July 23–August 3

Kingston puts together a chamber music season that feels genuinely dialed in. Not bloated, not sleepy, just really good music played by people who mean it. Held at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston offers a strong lineup of world-class musicians performing everything from Brahms to Piazzolla, with a special spotlight this year on the clarinet. Ricardo Morales leads performances of Weber and Brahms quintets that promise to be festival standouts. The setting is relaxed, the artistry is top-tier, and the music, as always, is the main event.

ODEA Picks:

• Wed, Jul 23 - Concert 1: A Celebration Of Latinx Music

• Sun, Jul 27 - Concert 3: “Trout”

• Wed, Jul 30 - Concert 4: A Night Of Stark Contrast

• Sun, Aug 3 - Concert 6: Celebrating 37 Years Of Musical Excellence

Ideal For: Chamber Music Enthusiasts, Clarinet Aficionados, and anyone who believes the best summer nights end with live music.

Venue Notes: Performances are held in the University of Rhode Island’s Fine Arts Center, an unpretentious, well-balanced hall with clear acoustics. The vibe is relaxed but attentive, with a loyal local audience and a steady stream of curious newcomers.

Bang on a Can: LOUD Weekend 2025

MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA · July 31–August 2

Three days. Dozens of performances. Not a single quiet corner. Bang on a Can’s LOUD Weekend drops a tidal wave of experimental sound into MASS MoCA’s (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) sprawling industrial space, turning old factory halls and echoey courtyards into a maze of music.

You can come for just a day or the full weekend, but either way, plan on roaming. This year’s highlights include Sō Percussion opening with Steve Reich’s Drumming, a rare live tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s film scores, and Julia Wolfe’s Forbidden Love, a piece that makes violins do things you probably haven’t heard before. Elsewhere, you’ll find hurdy gurdies, turntables, field recordings, and chamber music that doesn't sit still.

Ideal For: Weekend Trippers, Experiment Music Aficionados, Curious Museum-goers.

Venue Notes: MASS MoCA is a vast former industrial factory complex turned contemporary art museum. Think concrete floors, old brick, sky-lit galleries.

Berkshire Opera Festival

Great Barrington, MA · August 14, 23, 26, 29

Ten years in, Berkshire Opera Festival has figured out what the big houses sometimes miss: opera works best when it feels personal. It’s easy to feel small in a big opera house, but here, you’re close enough to really feel those moments with a single note or phrase hits you right in the chest.

Every summer, the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center becomes the beating heart of this small but serious company, now celebrating ten years of gutsy, full-scale productions. La Traviata anchors this season, starring soprano Vanessa Becerra making her BOF debut as Violetta—the courtesan whose real love story begins just as everything falls apart. The cast also includes tenor Joshua Blue, returning after a memorable Don Giovanni (2022) and baritone Darren Drone as Giorgio Germont, the father who ruins everything trying to save it.

The season opens with a festive 10th Anniversary Concert on August 14 featuring operatic favorites from the cast members past and present.

ODEA Picks:

• Thu, Aug 14 - 10th Anniversary Concert: Celebrating BOF’s Past, Present, and Future

• Sat, Tue, Fri, Aug 23, 26, 29 - La Traviata

Ideal For: Opera newcomers, Berkshire Weekenders.

Venue Notes: The Mahaiwe is a 1905 beauty with great acoustics and 680 seats. Big enough for drama, small enough for catching the fine details.

The Escapes

Weekend-worthy destinations where beautiful settings make the performances even more memorable.

Bard SummerScape

Fisher Center at Bard, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY · June 27–August 17

A train ride up the Hudson gets you to one of the most consistently surprising arts festivals on the East Coast. Set across Bard’s hilltop campus and the grounds at Montgomery Place, SummerScape is where overlooked operas and choreographer-composer collabs all exist in one very picturesque pocket of the Hudson Valley.

This summer’s standouts include Pastoral, a new Pam Tanowitz work reframing Beethoven’s Sixth through movement and Caroline Shaw's textured score. Dalibor, Smetana's rarely staged opera of love and rebellion gets its first full American production. And this year’s Bard Music Festival turns its focus to Bohuslav Martinů, with two weekends of concerts spanning his chamber, orchestral, and vocal works. Between the concert weekends, the mirrored Spiegeltent becomes an all-night salon with cocktails, cabaret, and dance parties under the stars.

ODEA Picks:

• Fri-Sun, Jun 27-29 - Pastoral: Tanowitz deconstructs Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony with her signature architectural choreography, set against live music by Caroline Shaw and abstract backdrops by artist Suzanne Bocanegra. A cerebral, sensual world premiere.

• Fri, Jul 25-Sun, Aug 3 - Dalibor: Smetana’s romantic tragedy opera centering on the main character's quest for redemption and revenge.

• Fri, Aug 8 - Opening night goes all in on Martinů, with folk tunes, Cold War energy, and a theremin cameo that’s more sci-fi daydream than orchestral standard.

• Sat, Aug 9 - Jazz meets resistance in this all-orchestral night: Schulhoff’s fierce Symphony No. 2 opens, followed by Martinů’s dreamlike “Incantation” piano concerto, a rarely heard piece by Rudolf Firkušný, and a memorial to a village erased by the Nazis.

• Thu, Aug 14 — Up close and acoustic. An evening of Martinů’s chamber works where every breath, bow stroke, and harmonic shift registers.

• Saturday nights all summer — Spiegeltent dance parties where the line between audience and artists disappears completely

Ideal For: A Day Trip, Upstate Weekenders, Operagoers Off The Beaten Path, Cabaret Crowds.

Venue Notes: Performances unfold across Bard’s striking Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center, an intimate black-box theater, and the Spiegeltent—a mirrored 1920s salon for late-night sets, dancing, and drinks under its striped canvas.

Caramoor

Katonah, NY · June 15–August 3

Beethoven hits different when you're horizontal on a blanket with a bottle of Sancerre chilling in your cooler, surrounded by 80 acres of Westchester greenery. That's the whole Caramoor vibe. Set on a former estate about an hour north of the city, it’s one of the few places where classical music gets the kind of unhurried evening setting it deserves.

Caramoor’s programming covers a lot of ground, from full orchestra Beethoven and Brahms to a taut Haydn-Dvořák program by the Takács Quartet. Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion return with an evening of experimental chamber pop and percussion-driven minimalism. Monteverdi’s Poppea, a Baroque opera from 1643, feels more like a slow-burn drama than something pulled from the history shelf.

A free shuttle from Metro-North’s Katonah station makes it easy to skip the car and pack your best picnic instead.

ODEA Picks:

• Sat, Jun 21 - Opening Night & Summer Gala: Orchestra of St. Luke’s – Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9

• Fri, Jun 27 - Daniil Trifonov, piano

• Thu, Jul 10 - Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion featuring Ringdown

• Sat, Jul 12 - Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea

• Sun, Jul 13 - Orchestra of St. Luke’s & Stella Chen, violin

• Fri, Jul 25 - Takács Quartet

• Sat, Aug 2 - Claire Bourg, violin Jinhee Park, piano

• Sun, Aug 3 - Orchestra of St. Luke’s & Garrick Ohlsson, piano

Ideal For: Classical fans who prefer their concerts with room to stretch, and anyone who knows a good picnic basket is half the experience.

Venue Notes: Performances happen throughout the estate, from the picturesque Spanish Courtyard to the 1,500-seat Venetian Theater. Picnicking on the lawn is highly encouraged.

Music Mountain

Falls Village, CT · June 8–September 14

In upstate Connecticut, there's this place called Music Mountain that's been doing one thing incredibly well since 1930: string quartets. We're talking about a venue where Jacques Gordon, former Chicago Symphony concertmaster, said something to the tune of "let's build the perfect room for chamber music" and had Sears ship up pre-fab Colonial Revival buildings to make it happen. Gordon Hall still has some of the best acoustics you'll find anywhere and there's something about driving up that mountain that makes you understand why musicians have been coming here for 93 years. These days they mix in some jazz on Saturday nights, but those Sunday afternoon quartet concerts remain the kind of pure musical experience that's getting harder to find.

ODEA Picks:

• Sun, Jun 22 - Marmen Quartet & Victoria Schwartzman, Piano: Haydn, Grosshandler, Brahms

• Sun, Jun 29 - Euclid Quartet: Haydn, Kauder, Tchaikovsky

• Sun, Jul 6 - Arianna String Quartet & Judith Gordon, Piano: Beethoven, Tower, Korngold

• Sun, Jul 13 - Penderecki String Quartet & Paul Marleyn, Cello: Brahms, Wijeratne, Schubert

• Sun, Jul 27 - American String Quartet & Daniel Avshalomov, Viola: Beethoven, Ravel, Brahms

• Sun, Aug 3 - Verona Quartet: Mendelssohn, Ellington, Shostakovich

• Sun, Aug 10 - Ying Quartet: Wolf, Puccini, Dvořák, Schubert

• Sun, Aug 24 - Cuarteto Latinoamericano & Oskar Espina Ruiz, Clarinet: Boccherini, Castellanos Yumar, Mozart, more

• Sun, Sep 7 - Cassatt String Quartet & Magdalena Baczewska, Piano: Mozart, Shostakovich, Schumann

• Sun, Sep 14 - Juilliard String Quartet: Beethoven, Dvořák “American” Viola Quintet

Ideal For: A Weekend Trip, String Quartet Purists, Acoustic Obsessives.

Venue Notes: All performances take place in Gordon Hall, a Colonial Revival concert space with famously warm acoustics and windows that let in mountain light. Dress is relaxed, reverence for the music is not optional.

Rockport Music

Rockport, MA · June 13–August 3

At Rockport Music's Shalin Liu Performance Center, the Atlantic Ocean provides a constantly shifting backdrop that either enhances or competes with the music, depending on your perspective. The Grammy-winning Imani Winds joins steel pan composer Andy Akiho for a program mixing his high energy compositions with Villa-Lobos and D'Rivera. The Isidore Quartet teams with saxophonist Steven Banks for an evening spanning Ravel and Beethoven plus Banks's own quintet. A Far Cry collaborates with writer Jeremy Eichler for a moving meditation on music and memory, featuring Bach, Mendelssohn, and Strauss. Rockport's seaside tourist appeal works in the festival's favor—the lobster rolls and gallery browsing feel like natural extensions of an evening spent listening to serious music with ocean views.

ODEA picks:

• Sun, Jun 15 - Dover String Quartet with Roberto Diaz

• Thu, Jun 19 - Isidore Quartet & Steven Banks

• Fri, Jun 27 - Imani Winds & Andy Akiho

• Sat, Jun 28 - Jonathan Biss, Piano: All-Schubert

• Sat-Sun, Jul 5-6 - The Fauré Project with Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis & Jeremy Denk

• Fri, Jul 11 - African Queens: Karen Slack & Kevin Miller

• Sat, Jul 12 - Appalachian Spring: Parker Quartet with Todd Palmer & Rockport Festival Chamber Orchestra

Ideal For: A Weekend Trip, Chamber Music Romantics, Lovers of an Ocean View.

Venue Notes: Performances take place in the stunning Shalin Liu Performance Center, where the stage is backed by a glass wall overlooking Rockport Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean.

The Surprises

Classical music thriving in places that do it their own way.

The Princeton Festival

Princeton, NJ · June 6–21

Princeton's June festival gets what makes summer music special: three weeks where soul, cabaret, classical, and opera unfold in gardens, historic churches and auditoriums around campus. This year’s centerpiece is Tosca (June 13, 15, 17) with Rossen Milanov and the Princeton Symphony Orchestra under the festival tent, delivering all the high-drama heartbreak Puccini intended. The June 14 program pairs dancers from American Repertory Ballet with live music from the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, featuring scenes from Swan Lake, Don Quixote, and a contemporary duet by Ethan Stiefel.

ODEA Picks:

• Fri, Sun, Tue Jun 13, 15, 17 – Tosca

• Sat, Jun 14 – An Evening of Pas de Deux: American Repertory Ballet & Princeton Symphony Orchestra

Ideal For: Day Trippers, Date Night, Opera Enthusiasts, Fans of Big Feelings.

Venue Notes: Performances take place in various venues across Princeton University campus, including the festival tent, historic churches, and in gardens.

Newport Classical

Newport, RI · July 4–22

Chamber music in Gilded Age mansions? Now that's an event worth planning around. For over five decades, Newport Classical has been filling the kind of spaces where Vanderbilts once summered with the music they were built to showcase. Twenty-nine concerts across eleven venues, from The Breakers' limestone halls to Rosecliff's ballroom, plus Castle Hill Inn where you get chamber music with an ocean backdrop. String quartets, piano recitals, and the occasional percussion ensemble treat Newport’s historic mansions like the concert halls they nearly are. Even the Newport Art Museum and the 1739 Colony House get in on it. It's chamber music that knows exactly where it belongs.

ODEA Picks:

• Wed, Jul 9 - Piano Quartets

• Thu, Jul 10 - Third Coast Percussion

• Sat, Jul 12 - Karen Slack: African Queens

• Sat, Jul 19 - Attacca Quartet

• Tue, Jul 22 - Closing Night with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and Stefan Jackiw

Ideal For: Weekend Trippers, Chamber music devotees with a soft spot for Gilded Age architecture.

Venue Notes: Concerts rotate through Newport’s historic mansions, museums, and seaside lawns. Expect a range of acoustics, ocean breezes, and chandeliers overhead.

Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival

Cape Cod, MA · July 29–August 22

Yes, the Cape has beaches and lobster rolls. But it also has a chamber music festival that’s been doing its thing for over 45 years without needing much fanfare. What started as a summer project for pianist Samuel Sanders is now a full scale Cape tradition, concerts popping up from Cotuit to Wellfleet in churches and art centers.

This season has a ton of variety. You’ll hear the Parker Quartet go deep on Schubert and Ravel, catch a reworked Bach double violin concerto including two clarinets (somehow it works), and spend an entire evening with Beethoven’s Septet. There’s also new commissions, unexpected program pairings, and the kind of all-star ensembles that make a Tuesday night in Chatham feel like a big deal.

ODEA Picks:

• Tue, Aug 5 - Popular Demand: The Return of the Claremont Trio

• Thu-Fri, Aug 7-8 - Unity Through Music: We are the Catalyst

• Mon, Aug 11 - Revelation: The Frautschi-Manasse-Nakamatsu Trio

• Fri, Aug 15 - Music for 6 and 7: Many Instruments, Extraordinary Sounds

• Tue, Aug 19 - Agile Virtuosity: Parker Quartet

• Thu-Fri, Aug 21-22 - Phenomenon: Two Manasses, One Nakamatsu & More

Ideal For: A Week on the Cape, Chamber Music Enthusiasts.

Venue Notes: Concerts take place across the Cape in acoustically clear, small-scale venues, from the Simon Center for the Arts in Falmouth to historic churches in Chatham and Wellfleet.

Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival

Bridgehampton, NY · July 19–August 17

If you trade Manhattan concrete for Hamptons breezes come July, this is where to get your culture fix between beach days. The longest-running classical music festival on Long Island attracts both longtime chamber fans and the “what else is going on this weekend?” crowd. Artistic Director Marya Martin curates a tight, thoughtful lineup in settings that feel made for summer: Madoo Conservancy's rambling gardens, Parrish Art Museum's sleek galleries, and the sculpture garden at Channing. A lot of the players come from major orchestras or chamber groups, but they show up relaxed. It probably helps that the beach is ten minutes away.

ODEA Picks:

• Sun, Jul 20 - Opening Night: Schubert's Trout

• Thu, Jul 24 - Lyrical Contrasts: Schubert, Dohnányi & More

• Sun, Jul 27 - Songs Without Words: Mendelssohn/Torke/Golijov/ Fauré

• Thu, Jul 31 - Not The Stillness: Beethoven and More

• Fri, Aug 7 - Friendly Rivals: Telemann and Bach

• Sun, Aug 10 - Sublime Laments: Hummel/Watkins/Brahms

• Sun, Aug 17 - The Last Word: A Festive Finale

Ideal For: A Weekend Getaway, Chamber Music Enthusiasts.

Venue Notes: Performances rotate between the Madoo Conservancy gardens, the modern outdoor spaces of Channing Sculpture Garden, and the contemporary galleries of the Parrish Art Museum.

Manchester Summer Chamber Music

Manchester-by-the-Sea & Ipswich, MA · August 9–23

Manchester Summer Chamber Music started as a way to bring chamber music to the beach crowd. Now, it’s become a summer fixture on the North Shore where concerts aren’t just about performance, but about sharing music with the community just as founders Sage Cole and Lorna Tsai intended. This August’s lineup moves from Beethoven to Caroline Shaw, with a Mendelssohn sibling project that adds storytelling to the mix. Concerts take place in a private home in Manchester and at the Barn at Castle Hill in Ipswich, where you can listen to a string quartet while the sun drops behind Crane Beach.

ODEA Picks:

• Sat, Aug 9 - By The Moonlight: Movements from Quartets and Quintets by Beethoven, Dvorak, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Jesse Montgomery

• Sat, Aug 16 - Fractured Shadows: Quartets from Beethoven to Caroline Shaw at The Barn at Castle Hill

• Sat, Aug 23 - Cellobration!: Featuring Vivaldi's Double Cello Concerto and Schubert's "Cello Quintet" at The Barn at Castle Hill

• Wed-Fri, Aug 13-15 - Fanny & Felix: A Narrative Performance Exploring the Mendelssohn Siblings

Ideal For: A Weekend Getaway, Chamber Music Lovers Drawn to the Sea, Date Night with Coastal Charm.

Venue Notes: Performances happen in an elegant private home in Manchester and the beautifully rustic Barn at Castle Hill in Ipswich, where post-concert strolls through the estate grounds are part of the experience.

You’re probably looking for more than just another season brochure. That’s what ODEA is for. We cover the concerts that slip past the glossy previews: string quartets in crypts, operas in downtown theaters, new music in old churches. The kinds of performances you hear about a week too late. If that sounds like your thing, subscribe, share, or go check out something unexpected. I’ll be out there too.

— Owen

Thumbnail image courtesy of Tanglewood. Credit: Hilary Scott.

The Concerts

Dudamel Conducts in Central Park

Great Lawn, Central Park — Wed, June 4 · 8pm

Gustavo Dudamel brings the New York Philharmonic to Central Park's Great Lawn for the kind of summer evening that actually lives up to the hype. Thousands of New Yorkers sprawl on blankets, unpacking wine and snacks for an evening that pairs Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony and Stravinsky's Firebird Suite with trumpet master Arturo Sandoval and Venezuelan cuatro player Jorge Glem. The peak New York moment comes when former Yankees legend Bernie Williams shows up with his guitar, turning this into a concert that only this city could pull off.

The same program hits all five boroughs: Van Cortlandt Park (June 5), Prospect Park (June 6), Cunningham Park in Queens (June 7), and St. George Theater in Staten Island (June 8). It's completely free, totally accessible to first-timers, and the kind of summer evening that shows just how good this city can be. Just bring a blanket and get there early.

Ideal For: First-time Classical Concertgoers, Those Who Want the Full New York Experience, Yankees Fans with Evolving Taste.

Gala Concert with María Dueñas, Saioa Hernández, and David Afkham: A Musical Fantasy From Spain

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage, Carnegie Hall, Midtown — Thu, June 5 · 8:30pm

Madrid's Teatro Real (Royal Opera of Madrid) returns to Carnegie Hall with the kind of program that spans European elegance, folk rhythm, and movie soundtrack richness. At its center sits Korngold's Violin Concerto, that curious blend of Austro-Romanticism and Hollywood gloss performed by rising Spanish violinist María Dueñas, whose technique is just off the charts (see what I mean with her Paganini caprices album). Framing it are Turina's folk-inflected Danzas fantásticas and Ravel's deconstructed waltz fantasia La valse, creating a story about how musical traditions travel and change over time. Spanish soprano Saioa Hernández makes her U.S. debut with a set of zarzuela and Falla selections, capping off an evening of music that’s way overdue for a bigger spotlight.

Ideal For: Curious Listeners, Classical and Film Score Enthusiasts, Big Night Out.

ARTEK Madrigal Madness

Saint Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church, Upper West Side — Thu, June 5 · 7pm, Sat, June 7 · 4pm

ARTEK celebrates 40 years with Madrigal Madness, a fast-moving set of Monteverdi’s greatest hits and lesser-known gems, sung by some of the city's most seasoned early music performers. If you’ve never heard a madrigal live, this is the entry point. Expressive, strange, and surprisingly immediate, sung without amplification in the echoing beauty of Saint Ignatius of Antioch. The June 5 show includes a reception while the June 7 matinee offers tiered pricing. Either way, come ready to hear 400-year-old music that still knows how to stir things up.

Ideal For: Your Renaissance-Core Era, Curious First-Timers, Early Music Enthusiasts.

Zemlinskys Zimmer | Zemlinsky's Room

BAM Fishman Space, Fort Greene, Brooklyn — Thu, June 5-Sun, June 8

Zemlinskys Zimmer reimagines Alexander Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy—a one-act opera about desire, betrayal, and murder set in Renaissance Florence. Staged by the little OPERA theatre of ny, this stripped-down production pares back the orchestration while keeping the score’s late-Romantic lushness. With Oscar Wilde’s biting text, a brooding visual design, and a venue that swaps out red velvet and chandeliers for black walls and bare light, the production plays more like a pressure cooker than a powder room. If you like your opera unnerving and a little claustrophobic, this one’s worth it.

Ideal For: Cultural Contrarians, Date Night, Arts intellectuals who thrive on being "in the know”.

The Knights at Naumburg Orchestral Concerts

Naumburg Bandshell, Central Park — Tue, June 10 · 7:30pm

The Knights return to Central Park's Naumburg Bandshell with the kind of eclectic programming they’ve built their name on—baroque precision, Romantic warmth, and contemporary edge, all in one set. This free concert (yes, actually free, no tickets required) ranges from Vivaldi's perfectly calibrated Concerto Grosso in G minor to William Grant Still's dreamy Summerland to Chen Yi's marimba-infused string arrangements. The Jacobsen brothers (Colin on violin, Eric conducting) lead their collective of top-tier musicians through a musical journey that feels both intellectually satisfying and genuinely fun. There's something unmistakably New York about catching this level of musicianship in the heart of Central Park as summer evenings stretch longer.

Ideal For: Open-Air Listeners, People Who Pack Wine in a Tote, Anyone who wants baroque with birdsong.

MATA Festival 2025: INTERGALACTIC INFINITY: Music Between Spaces

ISSUE Project Room, Downtown Brooklyn — Wed-Sat, June 11–14 · 7pm

If your usual concert calendar feels a little predictable, MATA Festival’s 27th season is ready to launch you elsewhere. This year’s theme, INTERGALACTIC INFINITY: Music Between Spaces isn’t just a tagline, it’s a four-night exploration of myth, politics, electronics, and alternate realities, curated for listeners who like their music a little sideways.

It all happens at ISSUE Project Room, a cavernous, experimental space in Downtown Brooklyn known for pushing the edges of sound and performance. The setting fits: Opening night sends Sun Ra Arkestra and FLUX Quartet into orbit with Jessie Cox’s Enter the Impossible, a swirling tribute to cosmic jazz. Night two brings in Wadada Leo Smith and Roscoe Mitchell with sharp, unpredictable takes on American democracy. Friday leans more meditative with the world premier of Reza Vali’s Salmak, blending Persian modal theory with the string quartet form. The festival closes with George Lewis’s shape-shifting Experiments in Living, alongside a mix of dreamlike, off-kilter works including one scored for piano and credit cards.

MATA is known for championing early-career composers, but it’s really about what’s next in music. Expect bold premieres, strange textures, and music that makes you sit up and listen differently.

Ideal For: Genre Skeptics, New Music Connoisseurs, Brooklyn Night Out, People Chasing What’s Next.

Wet Ink Ensemble

Roulette Intermedium, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn — Fri, June 13 · 8pm

You don't go to a Wet Ink Ensemble show expecting to understand every note, you go to get beautifully lost. Their performance at Roulette features four composer-performers joining Wet Ink onstage: Ben LaMar Gay, Gelsey Bell, Aurora Nealand, and Carolyn Chen—artists who don’t just write music, but build sound worlds that reshape the room around them.

Watching Ben LaMar Gay perform at Public Records in May, singing to the pulse of his handbells, locking in with his quartet while the music veered unpredictably, I was entranced. That same playful energy runs through his work, which often sounds like a shortwave radio catching signals from Chicago house parties to Brazilian blocos.

Each of the artists brings their own kind of vibe. Bell coaxes the daxophone, a weird wooden instrument, into a groaning animatronic ghost. Nealand draws from jazz, traditional New Orleans music, and free improvisation, while also turning everyday objects into instruments. Chen draws from her Chinese guqin practice to create meditative pieces that find nature in the most unnatural spaces. It’s the kind of night that makes rules feel irrelevant.

Ideal For: Experimental Music Seekers, Fans of Shapeshifting Sound, People who love being a little lost.

The Next Festival with Kronos Quartet

Merkin Hall, Kaufman Center, Upper West Side — Fri, June 13 · 8pm

The legendary Kronos Quartet joins The Next Festival's emerging string orchestra for a night where musical generations converge in celebration of Terry Riley's 90th birthday.

Artistic Director Peter Askim conducts Riley's The Sands (written for Kronos) alongside five works that showcase contemporary music's expanding palette: The premieres include Starlings for quartet and orchestra by Jungyoon Wie, whose music draws on themes of family, migration, and personal history; intimate music by yourself by inti figgis-vizueta, whose writing explores texture and space in ways that feels organic and adventurous; and Askim’s own Songs My Mother Taught Me, a work shaped by memory and the music that stays with you.

The evening also features Transition Behavior by jazz-rooted composer Pascal Le Boeuf, where glitchy, polyrhythmic layers feel kind of cinematic. Jan Radzynski’s Serenade for Strings closes the program, grounded in Eastern European tradition and shaped by sweeping post-Romantic expression. For Kronos, it’s another fearless dive into new music. For the young artists of Next Festival, it’s the kind of night that feels like a turning point.

Ideal For: Contemporary Music Enthusiasts, Fans of Kronos Quartet, Terry Riley Disciples.

Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra: Opera Selections and Tchaikovsky

Brooklyn Museum, Prospect Heights — Sun, June 15 · 2-4pm

There’s no bad way to spend a Sunday at the Brooklyn Museum, but this one comes with Italian opera arias echoing through its halls. The Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra wraps up its season at the Brooklyn Museum with conductor Felipe Tristán leading Verdi’s La forza del destino overture, followed by arias from Pagliacci, Turandot, and La bohème, sung by soprano Maria Brea and tenor Dane Suarez. The finale is Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, full of sweeping lines and restless energy. A great reason to stick around after your stroll of the exhibits.

Ideal For: Opera Fans, Symphony Romantics, Sunday Culture Seekers.

Met Orchestra: From Mexico City to the New World

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage, Carnegie Hall — Wed, June 18 · 8pm

This isn’t your typical Met Orchestra program, and that’s a good thing. It opens with Gabriela Ortiz’s Antrópolis, a portrait of Mexico City's nightclubs of the past and present. From there, the evening shifts to Bernstein’s Jeremiah Symphony, with soprano Angel Blue bringing real presence to this moody meditation on hope and collapse. The centerpiece and most compelling program choice is the New York premiere of a new orchestral suite from Terence Blanchard’s opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones, music that pulls from jazz, gospel, and classical. The orchestra closes with Dvořák’s New World Symphony, a piece long celebrated as a vision of American sound. Heard alongside Blanchard, it invites a striking conversation: two portraits of a nation, shaped more than a century apart, each speaking to the complexities of identity, influence, and belonging.

Ideal For: Fans of Familiar Music in a New Light, Date Night with Depth, Big Night Out.

The Comet / Poppea – Run AMOC* Festival at Lincoln Center

David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, Upper West Side — Wed-Sat, June 18-21

If you’re even slightly opera-curious, The Comet / Poppea might be the one to show up for. It’s strange, stunning, and staged somewhere between opera and a time warp—Monteverdi meets W.E.B. Du Bois by way of a spinning set, cosmic catastrophe, and a score by George Lewis that fuses baroque beauty with something more fractured and electric. AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company) brings it to Lincoln Center as part of their Run AMOC* Festival, placing the audience directly onstage, flanking the action while the vast auditorium looms empty behind it. Directed by Yuval Sharon and starring Davóne Tines and Anthony Roth Costanzo, this is opera reimagined not just musically, but architecturally, socially, and politically. It’s pay-what-you-can, which feels almost absurd for a production this ambitious, but also right in line with AMOC’s mission to crack open the form and let some air in.

Ideal For: Opera-Curious Outsiders, Big Night Out, Anyone who thinks opera needs a reset.

Summer for the City: PUBLIQuartet

The Underground at Jaffe Drive, Lincoln Center — Thu, June 19 · 8pm

PUBLIQuartet heads beneath Lincoln Center to The Underground at Jaffe Drive to offer a night that reframes what chamber music can be in America today. Their acclaimed “What Is American” project explores American musical identity through a program that places Dvořák’s “American” Quartet alongside works by Ornette Coleman and Rhiannon Giddens, drawing out shared roots in Black and Indigenous musical traditions. The multi-Grammy nominees have earned their reputation for improvising in real time and weaving together jazz, blues, and experimental sounds into a form all their own. As part of Lincoln Center's Summer for the City series, this free first-come-first-served performance is a chance to experience music that's both accessible and challenging in a performance that reminds us how American music has always been an ever-evolving conversation.

Ideal For: String Quartet Skeptics, Jazz-curious Listeners, Fans of Genre Crossovers.

Music for Sunrise and Sunset at Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Brooklyn Botanical Garden — Fri, June 20 · 5:15am & 8:30pm

Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Summer Solstice Celebration is exactly how you should welcome summer this year. The Cherry Esplanade hosts two genuinely special performances: a sunrise meditation (5:15am) featuring Matthew Evan Taylor's world premiere Afropneuma exploring breath and Black identity, and a sunset session (8:30pm) where Taylor's piece returns for an encore paired with Erik Hall’s arrangement of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians with Metropolis Ensemble full of electric guitars, synths, prepared piano, and voices.

There's something profoundly right about experiencing experimental composition in this 52-acre garden precisely as the seasons shift. The whole thing feels less like a concert and more like a ritual that actually matters – dawn choruses, drone meditations, and minimalist pulses creating the soundtrack to peak summer light. If you've ever wondered what it feels like when music and nature align, this is probably it.

Ideal For: Early Risers, Minimalist Music Devotees, Nature-sound Enthusiasts, Meditative Experiences, Peak NYC Summer Moments.

Second Ending Ensemble: Dvořák & Jenkins

The Appel Room, Jazz at Lincoln Center — Sat, June 21 · 8pm

A smart solstice pairing at The Appel Room, with Central Park as the backdrop on the year’s longest day. Conductor Ian Schaefer and his pickup orchestra (drawn from the city's top ensembles) place Dvořák’s familiar Symphony No. 9, with its borrowed American folk elements and Czech homesickness, alongside Katie Jenkins' newly commissioned A Solar Symphony, an exploration of the sun, Earth, and stars, with a nod to the English horn solo in Dvořák’s Ninth. The Appel Room's glass wall transforms from transparent to reflective as evening settles, creating a natural visual complement to a program about cultural exchange and new beginnings. Schaefer's approach does away with classical music's stuffier conventions without making a big deal about it. No intermission, casual dress, permission to applaud when moved. Jenkins and Dvořák with daylight fading over the park. Sometimes the simplest ideas work best.

Ideal For: Park-view Appreciators, Solstice Celebrators, Classical fans who prefer substance over ceremony.

Verona Quartet & Friends—A Swiss Journey

St. Paul’s German Lutheran Church, Chelsea — Tue, June 24 · 7-9pm

A chamber music journey through the Alps and beyond with Mendelssohn's Swiss inspirations brought to life through sound and visuals. The evening opens with Honegger’s atmospheric Sonatina, then moves to the world premiere of Benedict Strahl’s Schweizereisen, a piece inspired by Mendelssohn’s own alpine wanderings. Mendelssohn’s luminous String Quartet No. 1 follows, all Romantic clarity and mountain air. Just when you think you’ve settled into a groove, the program pivots: 1. Shostakovich’s jagged, searching Ninth Quartet feels like a dispatch from Soviet Russia, full of paranoia and coded messages. Projections of Mendelssohn’s Swiss watercolors and new works by Chrissy Angliker surround the music, making the evening feel immersive. Stick around after for wine and conversation at the post-concert reception.

Ideal For: Chamber Music Traditionalists, Visual Arts Crossover Fans, Anyone who treats a Tuesday night concert like a mini European escape.

Harawi – Run AMOC* Festival at Lincoln Center

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center — Thu, June 26 · 7:30pm

The American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*) transforms Messiaen’s strangely hypnotic love-death song cycle Harawi into something you’ll actually want to spend an hour with. Fresh off her Met run in El Niño and riding high on her Grammy win for Walking in the Dark, Julia Bullock brings that same intensity to Harawi at Alice Tully Hall, with pianist Conor Hanick. But the thing really comes alive when dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Zack Winokur join in, turning what could’ve been a normal recital into a four-body exploration. AMOC* keeps doing what most institutions won’t: stripping away the layers that make classical music feel off-limits. Choose-what-you-pay tickets make this one of the most accessible, high-level performances you’ll see all summer. Skip dinner, show up curious, and let it get weird.

Ideal for: Modern Classical Devotees, Dance-music Crossover Fans, Messiaen Obsessives.

Michael Gordon: The Forest of Metal Objects

The Met Cloisters, Fort George — Fri-Sun, June 27-29 · 7pm

Michael Gordon's The Forest of Metal Objects transforms The Met Cloisters into a clanging, thrashing wonderland where medieval architecture meets downtown experimental boldness. Gordon, a founding member of the innovative Bang on a Can collective, brings his distinct musical approach to this site-specific percussion piece, where sixteen musicians and six actors will move through halls typically reserved for viewing tapestries. Having spent decades exploring the boundaries between classical minimalism, rock aggression, and noise experimentation, Gordon now turns ancient stonework into natural amplifiers for his army of cymbals, gongs, and aluminum sheets, in a blend of instruments both ancient and industrial. With Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar (from Big Dance Theater) choreographing the human element, expect a performance that reveals new dimensions of the Cloisters through sound.

Ideal For: Post-punk Medievalists, Acoustic Adventurers, Contemporary Music Enthusiasts.

The Tin Angel

Ellen Stewart Theater, La MaMa, East Village — Sat-Sun, June 28-29

The Tin Angel at La MaMa might just be the most interesting ticket you'll ignore this month, which would be a mistake. Daniel Asia and Paul Pines made an opera that feels more at home in a downtown theater than a fancy opera house. Set in a grimy 1970s Bowery jazz club, it’s a world of ghosts, botched drug deals, family trauma, and bartenders working through their issues between pours, while the bodies pile up. Pablo, the club owner, finds himself haunted by his dead business partner and Holocaust survivor father as he navigates underworld violence and adopts his friend's secret son. Two-and-a-half hours of unhinged theater that feels like Aaron Copland writing the score for The Sopranos. Big feelings, knotty characters, and jazz that actually swings.

Ideal For: Fans of Mafia Dramas, Jazz and Opera Enthusiasts, People who think opera should have more grit.

Chopin & Mozart Piano Concertos with Alexandra Joan and the Semplice Players

Bargemusic at the Brooklyn Bridge Park Boathouse, DUMBO — Sun, June 29 · 2pm

If you’ve never heard a Chopin concerto with the East River glinting behind the pianist, this is your chance. Bargemusic’s summer series continues at the Brooklyn Bridge Park Boathouse with French-Romanian pianist Alexandra Joan leading Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12 and Chopin’s emotionally charged Concerto No. 1, scaled down for chamber ensemble without losing any of their shape or drama. The Semplice Players, true to their name, bring a refreshing clarity to music that can often get weighed down by tradition. Also on the program is Rossini’s playful Sonata a quattro, adding just enough levity to balance the afternoon. Bargemusic has long been one of the city's most quietly singular music venues: a once floating concert hall turned riverside sanctuary for chamber music that feels close and personal.

Ideal For: Afternoon Drift-Ins, First-Time Chopin Listeners, People who think concert halls should come with a view.

If you’ve made it this far, you probably want more—more than the usual listings, more than what’s in the season brochures. That’s what ODEA is for. We cover the concerts that don’t always make it into glossy previews: string quartets in crypts, operas in downtown theaters, new music in old churches. The kinds of performances you only hear about when it’s too late. If that sounds like your kind of listening, subscribe, share, or go check out something unexpected. I’ll be doing the same.

— Owen

Attacca Quartet

Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, Midtown — May 1

Grammy-winners Attacca Quartet serve up a fresh program celebrating Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, the current star of Carnegie's composer-in-residence series. They'll premiere her new Mujer Ángel alongside the vibrant Altar de Muertos—a colorful journey through Mexico's Day of the Dead traditions that transforms ancient rituals into contemporary sound. Rounding out the evening is Paul Wiancko's LIFT, a piece that manages the magic trick of feeling both centuries old and wholly modern. This is chamber music that speaks directly to 2025 listeners, whether you follow string quartets religiously or just want to hear what happens when classical traditions meet living composers.

Ideal For: Cultural explorers curious about Mexican classical influences, Listeners who want their chamber music with a shot of energy.

Venue Notes: Underground beneath Carnegie's main hall, Zankel's honey-toned wood walls create the perfect listening space where no seat feels distant. It feels like a deluxe recording studio where 599 people somehow got invited to the session.

Meta4: Declarations of Love

The 92nd Street Y, New York, Upper East Side — May 2

Finnish quartet Meta4 makes their NYC mainstage debut with a program that peels apart love in all its messy contradictions with the emotional clarity of a couples therapist. This rare US appearance shows off their signature style: taut, energetic playing delivered on their feet (minus the cellist). Declarations of Love opens with Janáček’s "Intimate Letters,” a string quartet overflowing with obsession, then moves to Sally Beamish’s Nine Fragments—a modern response to Schumann’s A-minor quartet. After that reflection, the program closes with Schumann’s A-minor quartet itself, played complete, its passion and vulnerability fully revealed.

Ideal For: Chamber music fans ready for something beyond the usual suspects, Fans of big feelings, Relationship contemplators who prefer their emotional journeys in musical form.

Venue Notes: Buttenwieser Hall has the warmth of a ballroom and the scale of a salon. An ideal space for chamber music that leans in close.

Long Play Festival 2025

Various Venues, Brooklyn — May 2–4

More than fifty concerts in three days. Long Play is Bang on a Can’s massive festival takeover, where "classical music" gets pushed, pulled, and reimagined beyond recognition. This year’s lineup bounces from Kim Gordon’s raw art-rock set to premieres by Henry Threadgill and Kate Moore, deep dives into Arvo Pärt and Julius Eastman, and a Terry Riley 90th birthday bash with the Bang on a Can All-Stars. If you're curious what the future of classical, and everything around it sounds like, this is your weekend.

Full Rundown

Ideal For: Curious listeners, Experimental music fans, Those who like their music without boundaries.

Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra: Rheinberger / Beethoven