Highland Glee Club - American Folk with HGC

War Memorial Auditorium

American Folk with HGC

Musicians of the Old Post Road - Through the Listening Glass

Worcester Historical Museum

Escape with the ethereal, other-worldly sound of the Glass Armonica, an invention of Ben Franklin! The instrument is paired with flute and strings in Mozart’s famous Adagio and Rondo alongside exotic gems by Reichardt, Naumann, and early American composers Antes and Moller. American ingenuity at its finest!

With Glass Armonica virtuoso Dennis James

New England Philharmonic - Paths of Peace

BU Tsai Performance Center

Paths of Peace

The NEP celebrates the conclusion of its 48th season by joining forces with Chorus Pro Musica to perform John Adams’ Harmonium, a powerful exploration of love and death featuring the texts of John Donne and Emily Dickinson. NEP concertmaster and perennial favorite Danielle Maddon explores Roxanna Panufnik’s beautiful Violin Concerto, reflecting on peace in challenging times. The dramatic Mathis der Maler from Paul Hindemith questions the role of the artist in an earlier politically complicated era. The season closes with Eric Nathan’s Open again a turn of light, which sets a text by Boston-based poet Sawako Nakayasu. The concert also celebrates Nathan’s contributions to the NEP, at the conclusion of his tenure as Composer-in-Residence.

Co-Production with Chorus Pro Musica

Roxanna Panufnik, Abraham (2015)
Boston Premiere
Danielle Maddon, violin

John Adams, Harmonium (1980)

Paul Hindemith, Mathis der Maler Symphony (1934)

Eric Nathan, Open again a turn of light (2023)
Boston Premiere

Vista Philharmonic Orchestra – Artistry Prevails

Groton Hill Music Center

Cadman, Charles Wakefield – Selections from Daoma
Shostakovich – Symphony No. 10

Guest vocalists: TBA

Our season finale is deeply meaningful to all of us in the Vista Philharmonic. This is a performance about change, about respect, and about standing up for the things we believe in. 

Charles Cadman set out to incorporate diverse influences and build a new American sound for his 1909 opera, Daoma. He used the stylistic language of his romantic classical training alongside elements of Omaha traditional music to compose something simultaneously fresh and reflective. This piece represents a moment in American history where cultural exchange, creation, and recording were all swirling together, and that excitement carries forward to our orchestra today.

Maestro Bruce Hangen was raised in Montana, a state steeped in Native American culture, and has made it part of his lifelong artistic mission to pay homage to people and practices that shaped him as a young man. Hangen last conducted this unique piece with the Omaha Symphony in 1992 after thoroughly researching its fascinating history, performing it just down the road from the Omaha Nation with representatives in the audience. 

We end our evening, and our 50th season, with a big work from a major symphonic composer. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony is all about Stalin’s criticism of his work – and the enduring lesson that artistry prevails. “For the listener of today,” wrote conductor Kurt Sanderling, who was there in 1953 when Shostakovich was composing the symphony, “it is perhaps more like a portrait of a dictatorship… of a system of oppression.” Music encourages us to think and to feel, and whether we’re performing on stage, listening in the audience, or composing deep into the night, it is that transformative power that truly carries us all forward.

Arcadia Players - "Venetian Vespers"

Grace Episcopal Church

"Venetian Vespers:" a reconstruction of Vespers at St Marks in Venice as celebrated in the 1640s

By the 1560s the music of St. Mark’s in Venice had more impact on European sacred music than any other church music institution, a dominance it maintained well into the 17th Century. During this period, Vespers took on even more musical importance than the Mass, and music became the focal point of the entire service. Prayers and readings were whispered underneath the sound of the music, so that Vespers was really more like a concert than a church service. This program features works by two of St. Mark's most important composers of the time, Giovanni Rovetta and Giovanni Rigatti. Their music was meant to appeal to the heart much more than to the mind, and is astoundingly sensual and almost overwhelming in its beauty.

Theatre III - Lucky Stiff

Theatre III

book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens

music by Stephen Flaherty

based on the novel by Michael Butterworth

Tony Award-winning writing team Ahrens and Flaherty's first produced show, Lucky Stiff is an offbeat, hilarious murder mystery farce, complete with mistaken identities, six million bucks in diamonds, and a corpse in a wheelchair.  Based on the novel "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo," the story revolves around an unassuming English shoe salesman who is forced to take the embalmed body of his recently murdered uncle on a vacation to Monte Carlo.  Should he succeed in passing his uncle off as alive, Harry Witherspoon stands to inherit $6,000,000.  If not, the money goes to the Universal Dog Home of Brooklyn... or else his uncle's gun-toting ex!

Melrose Symphony - May Pops Finale

Memorial Hall,

May Pops Finale

Join us for an unforgettable evening with the iconic music of John Williams, Henry Mancini, beloved selections from the musical Oklahoma, and the hypnotic rhythms of Ravel’s Bolero. Pianist Karen Walwyn joins the MSO to perform Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto - composed for the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight.