The New York Philharmonic season for 2026-27, announced on Tuesday, will be Gustavo Dudamel’s first as the music and artistic director. And it will be highlighted as much by where the orchestra plays as by what it plays.
The season will begin on Sept. 10 not at the orchestra’s Lincoln Center home, David Geffen Hall, but at Radio City Music Hall. The next day, it will give a memorial concert at the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center, observing the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks there.
Dudamel will conduct his first Lincoln Center performance with his new title a week later, with a world premiere by Zosha Di Castri and a performance of John Adams’s Sept. 11-inspired “On the Transmigration of Souls,” which the Philharmonic premiered in 2002. Dudamel will also conduct Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, with which he made his New York Philharmonic debut in 2007.
Come October, Dudamel and the Philharmonic will embark on a two-week, 10-stop tour in Europe, its first performances there in a decade. The program includes the Adams work, as well as another Dudamel staple, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
The timing of the tour, at what is typically the heart of the fall season, underscores the ambitions of the orchestra under its new leader.
“This is the launch of the Dudamel era in New York,” said Matías Tarnopolsky, the orchestra’s president and chief executive. “This idea of the New York Philharmonic as one of the nation’s greatest exports is important: We are taking the show on the road. Because telling the story overseas is absolutely part of our mission.”
Dudamel’s first season also includes a three-week focus on Beethoven, in spring 2027, for the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death. There will be four performances in May of “Egmont,” Beethoven’s music for the Goethe play, with new text by the playwright Jeremy O. Harris. The work was first presented in February by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where it was narrated by Cate Blanchett. (That role has not been cast for New York yet.)
The season will end in June with “Mass,” the theatrical composition by Leonard Bernstein, a former Philharmonic music director whose high-profile style and personal manner has drawn comparisons to Dudamel.
“It’s the first time we are doing it,” Dudamel said of “Mass” in an interview. “We are trying to do it with the community — we are planning to bring in community choirs, singers, to interact, to make this piece be a part of the social life of New York.”
— Adam Nagourney
A Tania León Premiere, Sept. 25-29
The last time this orchestra gave a world premiere by Tania León, she wound up winning the Pulitzer Prize. That was for “Stride” — a sneakily galvanic ode to the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, commissioned by the Philharmonic as part of its Project 19 initiative. So a return engagement makes all kinds of sense. León’s latest Philharmonic commission, “Imágenes Mestizas,” will premiere under Dudamel’s interpretive eye (alongside Mahler’s Symphony No. 5). Speaking of Project 19: Philharmonic concerts in January will bring the world premiere of Unsuk Chin’s long-awaited Trumpet Concerto.
— Seth Colter Walls
John Adams at 80, Feb. 4-6
In 1983, John Adams inspired a rare showdown of boos and applause when his “Grand Pianola Music” had its New York premiere at the Philharmonic. Today, though, Adams is hardly divisive, a reigning torchbearer of the American symphonic tradition. And he will conduct his own birthday celebration with a couple of hits from the decade of “Grand Pianola Music”: “The Chairman Dances,” an exhilarating outtake from “Nixon in China,” and the modern orchestral classic “Harmonielehre.” In between will be another New York premiere: “After the Fall,” his latest piano concerto, featuring Vikingur Olafsson, for whom it was written.
— Joshua Barone
Missy Mazzoli’s Piano Concerto, Feb. 11-13
The program that the Philharmonic has built around the U.S. premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s new piano concerto, conducted by Daniel Harding, is particularly gorgeous. The orchestra triples down on composers who specialize in rendering the beauty of light in all its dappling, ravishing and searing forms. Mazzoli is a modern master of chiaroscuro, and her piece sits alongside beatific visions from Wagner’s “Parsifal” and intoxicating scenes from Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé” suites. Written for and performed by the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, Mazzoli’s five-movement concerto was inspired, she has said, by his sensitive playing.
— Oussama Zahr
Joana Mallwitz’s Debut, April 29-May 1
The German conductor Joana Mallwitz makes her Philharmonic debut after a widely admired Metropolitan Opera outing last season, leading a propulsive, joyful account of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” In Berlin, where she is music director of the Konzerthaus Orchestra, she has energetically championed the music from the Weimar Republic. At the Philharmonic, she will present Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” Symphony, drawn from his 1934 opera about the Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald and reflecting on the role of artists in times of political dread. Ravel’s “La Valse” and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, with Francesco Piemontesi as the soloist, round out the program.
— Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
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