Join us as we celebrate the life-affirming power of music.
This fall, our concert halls will welcome in-person audiences, with safety guidelines in place. Livestreaming—our newest "stage"—will also be continuing for virtual audiences both near and far.
Explore below for a sneak peek at our fall concert schedule!
Oct 4, Nov 1, Dec 6, Mar 7, Apr 4, May 2 | 7:30 p.m.
Join us as we celebrate 37 years of First Mondays: well-loved classics and lesser known gems, performed by some of the finest chamber musicians in the world. First Mondays are performed in one of the finest places on the planet to hear music of this caliber: NEC’s own Jordan Hall.
This fall’s concerts, curated by Artistic Director Laurence Lesser, highlight works by Josquin des Prez, Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, and Igor Stravinsky. Drawing on the talent of NEC’s piano and keyboard community, the programs weave a thread throughout the centuries—all anchored in extraordinary music for keyboard.
Sep 30, Oct 21, Dec 9, Feb 10, Mar 17, Apr 21 | 7:30 p.m.
Hear all of Beethoven’s string quartets in a series of 6 concerts. The Borromeo String Quartet, NEC’s faculty quartet-in-residence, will play from the wider range of expressive markings Beethoven included in his handwritten manuscripts, in new editions prepared by violinist Nicholas Kitchen.
Chorus
Nov 16, 7:30 p.m. | NEC Chamber Singers: "Path of Miracles"
Inspired by the 9th century Roman Catholic Camino de Santiago, Joby Talbot's Path of Miracles explores the walk of a pilgrim through four major staging posts on the Camino Francés. Those who have tread the path claim their life is forever changed by the journey. In homage to those who came before, and in recognition of the challenges the global community has faced due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chamber Singers offer this performance to all seeking comfort, contemplation, and courage. "We have walked out of the lives we had and will return to nothing, if we live, changed by the journey, face and soul alike." - Robert Dickinson, librettist
Nov 29 & 30, 7:30 p.m. | NEC Symphonic Choir & Chamber Ensemble: "Rota Fortunae"
Regnabo. Regno. Regnavi. Sum Sine Regno. I shall reign. I reign. I have reigned. I am without a realm.
Join the NEC Symphonic Choir for the ensemble's inaugural concert in a 2-part performance of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. Satirical in nature, full of texts reflecting romance, impropriety and ridicule, this choral icon of the 20th century is a work which demands the spirit of the greatest bards throughout history.
The newest works from the next generation of composers.
Tuesday Night New Music is a student-run, faculty-supervised concert series directed by Brooks Clarke MM '22 under the supervision of composition chair Michael Gandolfi.
Composer's Series
Dates to be announced soon!
A series of concerts featuring works by NEC's Composition faculty.
Contemporary Improvisation
Sep 9, 7:30 p.m. | CI Opening Night
NEC kicks off the year with a live concert featuring faculty of the Contemporary Improvisation Department, with music from Persian, Appalachian, Middle Eastern, and Jewish traditions as well as Jazz, Avant Garde, new works, and more. The concert will feature Department Chairs Eden MacAdam-Somer and Hankus Netsky and founding Chair Ran Blake, as well as Nima Janmohammadi, Dominique Eade, Liz Knowles, Greg Liszt, Mal Barsamian, and many others.
A virtual broadcast of this live event will air on September 14, 7:30 p.m.
Oct 7, 7:30 p.m. | Music of Mary Halvorson
This concert, the pinnacle of a three-day residency, features the music of guitarist/composer/improviser Mary Halvorson as she collaborates with CI students in performances and reinterpretations of her work.
Nov 1 – Dec 16 | CI Salon Nights
Specific dates to be announced soon!
Nov 7, 7:30 p.m. | Linda Chase: "For Our Common Home", An Oratorio for Ecojustice
Nov 15, 7:30 p.m. | "Tradition"
For almost 50 years NEC's Contemporary Improvisation department has fostered a community of artists interested in studying music from different cultures and the interactions between them. This concert presents musical traditions from different corners of the world, drawing on their customs, histories, and stories, honoring their roots and re-examining them from new perspectives. Audiences may hear traditional works from the Mandé West African, Irish, and Persian music ensembles, along with new student and faculty pieces exploring tradition, and what it means to us as we move through our daily lives. The purpose of this concert is not only to contemplate and celebrate tradition, but to consider its impact and role in our world today.
Jazz
Sept 23, 7:30 p.m. | Bassist/composer and NEA Jazz Master Dave Holland
NEC's visiting artist-in-residence Dave Holland performs with NEC students.
Oct 21, 1 p.m. | Panel Discussion with Arturo O'Farrill and Mehmet Ali Sanlikol, moderated by Ken Schaphorst
Oct 21, 7:30 p.m. | NEC Jazz Orchestra featuring Arturo O'Farrill
In collaboration with NEC's Intercultural Institute, the NEC Jazz Orchestra will present a performance of Chico O'Farrill's legendary "Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite" along with guest Arturo O'Farrill's "Afro-Latin Jazz Suite." NEC faculty member Mehmet Ali Sanlikol will also join the NEC Jazz Orchestra in a performance of his "Abraham Suite."
Nov 1 – Dec 16 | Jazz ensemble concerts
Specific dates to be announced soon!
Nov 29 – Dec 2 | Cécile McLorin Salvant, Grow Your Art Residency
In a week-long collaborative residency with NEC's Entrepreneurial Musicianship Department, pioneering artist McLorin Salvant will discuss lessons learned in the music business, work closely with NEC students, and present a concert (see below) in which she performs with small NEC student ensembles.
Dec 2, 7:30 p.m. | Cécile McLorin Salvant performs with NEC student ensembles
Dec 9, 7:30 p.m. | NEC Jazz Orchestra plays the music of Mary Lou Williams
Dec 14, 7:30 p.m. | NEC Jazz Composers' Workshop Orchestra
The Jazz Composers' Workshop Orchestra is devoted to rehearsing and performing works by NEC Jazz Composition students. Coached by jazz faculty member Frank Carlberg, the ensemble gives its composers the opportunity to learn how to rehearse and conduct a band, as well as have their works heard.
Opera and Voice
Liederabend
Oct 13, 6 p.m. | "Shadows in the Garden: The Musical Legacy of Paul Verlaine"
Paul Verlaine inspired generations of song composers with his visionary, evocative poems. This concert explores his far-reaching influence, featuring well-known settings by Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré alongside lesser-known masterpieces by Nadia Boulanger, Edgar Varese, and Jules Massenet. Verlaine’s poems provided a rich landscape for musicians who were drawn to the mysterious tensions and subtle instabilities in his created worlds.
Nov 3, 6 p.m. | "The Ungifted Sex: Pioneer Women Composers of Song in the 19th Century"
“A woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all,” said a critic in response to Germaine Tailleferre’s compositions. Women composers of the 19th century defied pervasive sexism through countless compelling songs. As gifted and active as these women were, they could not lead professional lives as composers—but they paved the way for women of the next century to do so. Join us in exploring songs by Pauline Viardot (Happy 200th Birthday!), Ethel Smyth, Maude Valerie White, Liza Lehmann, Germaine Tailleferre, Cécile Chaminade, Lili Boulanger, Alma Mahler, Josephine Lang, Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn, and NEC’s own Florence Price and Amy Beach.
Dec 1, 6 p.m. | "Exilers: Composers and Poets Set Adrift"
From Benjamin Britten’s New York song cycles, to the poems of Luis Cernuda and Marina Tsvetaeva, to the many Austrian and German composers who fled their homelands in the twentieth century, this concert celebrates the resilience of the creative spirit in the face of dislocation and upheaval. We honor the many ways artists have channelled the violence of their immediate circumstances into works of profound beauty and transformation.
Opera
Oct 26 & 28, 6 p.m. | Perkin Opera Scenes
Enjoy an evening of scenes in the intimate setting of NEC's Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre. These concerts display the work that goes on daily in NEC's opera program, as faculty prepare graduate student singers for performing careers. Perkin Opera Scenes at NEC appear under the generous sponsorship of longtime NEC supporter Winifred Perkin Gray and the Perkin Fund.
Nov 18, 19, & 20, 7:30 p.m. and Nov 21, 4 p.m. | Ana Sokolović's "Svadba-Wedding" Svadba is a tour de force a cappella opera showcasing six female voices. The opera takes place the night before a wedding, as girlfriends prepare the bride-to-be for her impending marriage. The text, based on Serbian poetry, and music, derived from traditional folklore, combine to create a world of beautiful and seductive sensations.
Dec 9 | Musical Theatre Project
More details coming soon!
Dec 13–15, 6 p.m.| "More Than You Can Handel: Handel Arias"
An evening of Handel arias presented by graduate Opera students.
Orchestra
Philharmonia
Sep 29, 7:30 p.m. | "Darkness to Light"
As we emerge from a global pandemic, NEC's Philharmonia performs three works that explore the journey from darkness to light, oppression to freedom, turmoil to triumph. Beethoven's politically charged opera of unjust imprisonment and rescue, Florence Price's portrait of the Black American experience, and Brahms' epic Piano Concerto no. 1, a work he labored over for several years and may have been shaped by the suicide attempt of his mentor Robert Schumann, all explore complex human struggles. And we welcome Artist Diploma student and Tchaikovsky Competition medalist George Li as soloist.
BEETHOVEN: Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72b
PRICE: Ethiopia's Shadow in America
BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15 George Li, piano
The four works on this program all explore memory and dreamlike recollections of the past. Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta is a wild reimagination of the composer’s childhood memories of local musicians, Debussy’s quietly revolutionary adaptation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem L’après midi d’un faun about a faun’s fever dream, Missy Mazzoli’s Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) with its captivating reimagination of Baroque florid ornamentation, and Schumann’s 3rd Symphony, featuring one of his most striking intermezzos—a delicate and transparent vision of a distant memory, gone forever.
MAZZOLI: Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)
KODALY: Dances of Galánta
DEBUSSY: Prélude à L' Apres-midi d'un faune
SCHUMANN: Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 97, "Rhenish"
Tristan Rais-Sherman '21 AD, conductor
Oct 27, 7:30 p.m. | Conducted by Ludovic Morlot (former BSO Assistant Conductor)
JOLAS: Letter from Bachville
LALO: Cello Concerto
SCHUMANN: Symphony No. 2 Timotheos Petrin, cello
Nov 3, 7:30 p.m. | "Making Choices"
Anthony Davis is best known for his operas, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and The Central Park Five, works that boldly face America’s fraught racial history. Dedicated to Black novelist Ralph Ellison and inspired by Duke Ellington, Davis’s Notes from the Underground springs from that same concern.
Like a character in one of Davis’ operas, the hero of Beethoven’s dramatic Coriolan Overture faced a life-altering conflict between situations over which he had no control and his personal integrity.
Completed shortly before Beethoven’s death, Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 (“The Great”) expanded the model of his revered predecessor’s symphonies into harmonically daring, ever-songful music of “heavenly length.”
BEETHOVEN: Coriolan Overture, Op. 62
DAVIS: "Notes from the Underground"
SCHUBERT: Symphony No. 9, in CM, D. 944, "The Great C Major"
Brahms’s unabashedly romantic Piano Concerto No. 2 is preceded on this concert by Aaron Copland’s “Orchestral Variations.” A 1957 orchestration of Copland’s astringent “Piano Variations” (1930), it casts new light on a landmark of American piano music, one in which the composer moved beyond his jazzy works of the 1920s to a more dissonant language. Similarly, Julia Perry’s early compositions were influenced by spirituals and the blues, but her later music, like “A Short Piece for Orchestra” (1952), adopted the more abstract style of post-World War II European modernism.
PERRY: Short Piece for Orchestra
COPLAND: Orchestral Variations
BRAHAMS: Piano Concerto No. 2
The pandemic has forced us to question many basic assumptions about both our everyday lives and the state our country. Joan Tower’s “Made in America”— a 21st-century take on “America the Beautiful” — is bracketed on this concert by two contrasting works of Charles Ives: “The Unanswered Question” asks the biggest question of all, while “Variations on 'America'" harks back to an earlier time of bombastic, sentimental patriotism.
VERDI: Overture to "La Forza del Destino"
IVES: The Unanswered Question
TOWER: Made in America
IVES: Variations on "America"
TAN DUN: Passacaglia: Secret of Wind and Birds
PROKOFIEV: Sinfonia Concertante, Op. 125
STILL: Darker America
TCHAIKOVSKY: Romeo and Juliet Overture - Fantasie
Haydn’s taught, tense and expressive 44th symphony paved the way for a new direction in symphonic writing. Two hundred years later, Weinberg’s deeply personal 7th symphony, under a neo-classical guise, presents an enigmatic portrait of this prolific composer’s trials and tribulations.
HAYDN: Symphony No. 44 in E minor, "Trauer-Symphonie"
WEINBERG: Symphony No. 7, Op. 81
Nov 17, 7:30 p.m.
ELGAR: Serenade in E minor, Op. 20
SHOSTAKOVICH: Chamber Symphony, Op. 118a
SAY: Chamber Symphony, Op. 62
Wind Ensembles
Oct 14 | Symphonic Winds: "The Art of Transcription"
BRAHMS: Haydn Variations, arr. for winds
IVES (arr. Holcomb): "The Alcotts," for trombone choir
STENHAMMAR (arr. Holcomb): Symphony No. 2, 4th movement
PARRY: Nonet in B-flat major, Op. 70
Works conducted by: Nic Ayala, DMA Candidate; Harris Malasky, DMA Candidate; Roland Davis, MM Candidate; and William Drury.
Oct 26 | Wind Ensemble: "Opening Explosion!"
HANDEL: Fireworks Music
STRAUSS: Suite in B-flat, Opus 4
AUSTIN: Nine Inventions (world premiere)
VACLAVIK: In Homage Christopher Rouse (East Coast premiere)
Open the season with a flash! NEC students positioned around Jordan Hall envelop you in Handel’s music to celebrate our return to making music! We offer the East Coast premiere of a memorial work in honor of an NEC favorite, composer Christopher Rouse.
Charles Peltz, conductor
Nov 11 | Symphonic Winds
Repertoire TBA
Teddy Malasky '16 MM, '24 DMA, conductor
Nov 18 | Wind Ensemble
BRANTS: Angels and Devils
WIESE: Parallel and Perpendicular (world premiere)
NOVAK: Loose Caboose (world premiere)
SCHULLER (arr. Bozik): Organ Symphony (arrangement premiere)
Charles Peltz, conductor
Dec 16 | Wind Ensemble Graduate Conductors Concert
Repertoire TBA
Plus:
Concerts produced by student clubs
Recitals
Master classes
And more
The official NEC concert calendar is being updated daily for the fall. For more program details and ticketing information as full concert listings are added, click here