Carnegie Hall announced its 2025-26 season on Wednesday, with much of it devoted to celebrating the 250th birthday of the United States through a citywide festival featuring genres including jazz, rock, hip-hop, musical theater and classical music.
Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said that the festival was meant to showcase “the sheer breadth and dynamism of America.”
“Whether you look at film, Broadway, jazz or hip-hop, it’s all very vivid music-making,” he said. “It runs across the whole population.”
The season will open in October with the conductor Daniel Harding leading the NYO-USA All-Stars, an ensemble affiliated with Carnegie, in works by Bernstein and Stravinsky. That performance will also include Yuja Wang leading Tchaikovsky’s grand Piano Concerto No. 1 from the keyboard.
The composer Arvo Pärt, who turns 90 in September, will be honored at Carnegie all season, with his friends and collaborators leading performances of his works. Pärt, Gillinson said, “always has spoken in a language that everybody can engage with.”
Carnegie’s season — some 170 performances — will also feature the conductor Marin Alsop, the pianist Lang Lang, the vocalist Isabel Leonard and the violinist Maxim Vengerov, who each will organize a series of Perspectives concerts.
Here are 12 highlights from the season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ
Estonian Festival Orchestra, Oct. 23
What better way to celebrate the 90th birthday year of Arvo Pärt than with some of his music’s finest interpreters and compatriots? Paavo Järvi will lead the Estonian Festival Orchestra (whose festival in Parnu, Estonia, is honoring Pärt this summer) in an all-Pärt program that also features the Estonian Philharmonic Choir and starry soloists like Midori and Nico Muhly. The choir returns the next evening for another program of works by Pärt, performed with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra. JOSHUA BARONE
Philharmonia Orchestra, Oct. 28
Expect sparks to fly when Marin Alsop leads the Philharmonia Orchestra in Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, with its eye-popping bursts of instrumental color. In the first half, the elegant pianist Alexandre Kantorow takes on the electric wit of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3. In March, Alsop returns to lead the Philadelphia Orchestra in more Prokofiev, as well as a new work by John Adams and Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, with Hayato Sumino, the YouTube sensation and audience favorite at the 2021 Chopin Competition. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Nov. 6
When the conductor Raphaël Pichon made his New York debut at Carnegie with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s last month, he pulled together pieces by Schubert into a fascinating narrative program. Returning with St. Luke’s next season, his subject appears to be Beethoven, with a concert including the almighty Ninth Symphony; the great slow movement from the Seventh Symphony, in Friedrich Silcher’s unfamiliar choral arrangement; and little-heard selections from Beethoven’s incidental music for “Leonore Prohaska.” ZACHARY WOOLFE
Nicolas Altstaedt and Thomas Dunford, Nov. 18
The vibrant lutenist Thomas Dunford and the sweet-toned cellist Nicolas Altstaedt come together in the intimate Weill Recital Hall for a program featuring French Baroque pieces originally written for viola da gamba by Marin Marais and Antoine Forqueray. Parts of Bach’s great cello suites are also on the agenda, as is a melancholy movement from Henri Duparc’s 19th-century Cello Sonata. Dunford and Altstaedt also nod to Pärt’s composer residency with a transcription of one his most celebrated pieces, “Spiegel im Spiegel.” ZACHARY WOOLFE
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Dec. 3
Manfred Honeck’s directorship of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra must be counted as one of the country’s most successful conductor-ensemble collaborations, his thoughtful interpretations of the standard repertory inflaming the players’ super-committed virtuosity. They will bring to Carnegie a program that begins with Lera Auerbach’s “Frozen Dreams” and features the pianist Seong-Jin Cho in Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini,” before closing with Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, which they released in 2017 on a refined yet coruscating recording. ZACHARY WOOLFE
Igor Levit, Jan. 22
A pianist of dashing perspicacity and muscular technique, Igor Levit likes to double down on challenges. Last March, he regaled Carnegie concertgoers with solo transcriptions of symphonic works by Mahler and Beethoven, and next season he tackles variations, with Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations and Frederic Rzewski’s “The People United Will Never Be Defeated.” These pieces, which take off from a throwaway waltz and a Chilean protest song, require the kind of long-breathed concentration that is Levit’s forte. OUSSAMA ZAHR
Leif Ove Andsnes, Jan. 27
You go to a recital by the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes to be as surprised as you are awed. His dignified virtuosity is a given, and will be a reason to a look forward to Robert Schumann’s “Carnaval” at the end of a program that also includes works less famous but likely more revelatory: selections from Gyorgy Kurtag’s “Jatekok,” Janacek’s “On the Overgrown Path” and Liszt’s “Consolations,” as well as more Schumann and a Bartok Burlesque. JOSHUA BARONE
Met Orchestra, Feb. 4
When supervising an early release of his ballet “Fancy Free,” Leonard Bernstein included a prologue number, “Big Stuff,” and got Billie Holiday to sing it. You can feel some of that stylistic expansiveness in the programming for this concert, which is part of United in Sound: America at 250. Alongside a suite from Bernstein’s ballet and a Barber staple, you’ll find William Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony” — another piece that takes mutual inspiration from European concert tradition and Black American music. SETH COLTER WALLS
Budapest Festival Orchestra, Feb. 6 and 7
Expect the unexpected whenever Ivan Fischer conducts the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which he helped found in 1983. The mutual trust and elegant, unshowy music-making of these players is sure to breathe life into what may seem like traditional programming: Arvo Pärt’s “Summa,” Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 and the Sibelius Violin Concerto, with the charismatic Maxim Vengorov, on Feb. 6; the bucolic spirituality of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 on Feb. 7. Plus, Fischer always keeps some surprise up his sleeve for the end of the evening. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
Vikingur Olafsson, March 24
The pianist Vikingur Olafsson, a wellspring of thoughtfulness and eloquence, has two visits to Carnegie planned next season. In the spring, he will take on some of the most profound music for piano, Beethoven’s final three sonatas. And earlier, on Oct. 29, he will appear with the Philharmonia Orchestra (under its principal conductor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali) in Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, on a program that also includes Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony and the local premiere of a new work by Gabriela Ortiz. JOSHUA BARONE
Philadelphia Orchestra, May 29
The symphonic catalog of the composer and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis has only been getting better. The balance between complex rhythmic interplay and memorable melodic writing in his Fourth was particularly enjoyable, so I’m looking forward to the New York premiere of his latest symphony — subtitled “Liberty” — alongside Beethoven’s Seventh and a new work by Julia Wolfe. The Philadelphia Orchestra is well attuned to Marsalis’s aesthetic, thanks to its recent recording of his Violin Concerto. SETH COLTER WALLS
Lise Davidsen, June 5
In 2023, the incandescent dramatic soprano Lise Davidsen made her New York City recital debut like an opera star: with an aria-heavy solo program at the Metropolitan Opera. In that concert, she and the pianist James Baillieu dipped a toe in Schubert’s oeuvre, enlivening some of his best-loved art songs with bighearted, lovingly limned renditions. Now, in the manner of a lieder singer, she will join Baillieu for an entire program of this composer’s output. OUSSAMA ZAHR
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