31 Classical-Music Performances We Can’t Wait to Hear This Fall

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This year’s Fall Preview consists of all the entertainment — from TV to video games to theater — that Vulture writers and editors are excited to consume this season. Below, our classical-music list:

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New York Philharmonic

September 11–16

Venue: Geffen Hall

Gustavo Dudamel launches the fall season with a world premiere by the Hawaiian composer Leilehua Lanzilotti and Charles Ives’s panorama of Americana, the Symphony No. 2. Yunchan Lim joins in for Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Opens September 21

Venue: Metropolitan Opera

Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel gets the operatic treatment from composer Mason Bates in a production directed by Bartlett Sher.

New York Philharmonic

September 27 and 30

Venue: Geffen Hall

Conductor Marta Gardolińska makes her Philharmonic debut with a program so full of flash it could be blinding: Mason Bates’s Devil’s Radio, Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 2, and Lutoslawski’s dazzling Concerto for Orchestra.

11,000 Strings

September 30–October 7

Venue: Park Avenue Armory

Georg Friedrich Haas encircles the audience with a chamber orchestra plus 50 pianos tuned to explore the microtonal world of notes between the notes.

New York Philharmonic

October 3–11

Venue: Geffen Hall

Esa-Pekka Salonen returns to one of his favorite podiums to lead a program of his favorite composers: Debussy, Bartók, and his mentor, Pierre Boulez.

La Sonnambula

Opens October 6

Venue: Metropolitan Opera

Bellini’s opera about the sleepwalking, sleep-singing Swiss fräulein arrives in a new production directed by the star tenor Rolando Villazón with Nadine Sierra in the title role.

National Youth Symphony All Stars

October 7

Venue: Carnegie Hall

Opening the Carnegie Hall season is usually the purview of gold-tipped orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic, but this year the honor goes to veterans of the hall’s own youth ensemble.

Jeremy Denk

October 8 and 9

Venue: Board of Officers Room, Park Avenue Armory

The pianist, who characteristically blends deep thoughtfulness with technique and endurance, in a two-part traversal of Bach’s six partitas.

Isabelle Faust, violin

October 10

Venue: Schwarzman Auditorium, Frick Collection

The first full season in the renovated Frick’s new underground hall starts both small and big: one violin, two big chunks of Bach, and a smattering of works by the 17th-century Italian composer Nicola Matteis.

The Gesualdo Six

October 18

Venue: Church of St. Mary the Virgin

The polar figures of 16th-century Italian choral music, Palestrina, the Apollonian master of elegant counterpoint, and Gesualdo, the violent renegade of plangent harmonies, meet on the same program presented by Miller Theater.

San Juan Hill: A New York Story

October 23

Venue: Alice Tully Hall

Jazzman Etienne Charles tells the story of the neighborhood that Lincoln Center obliterated in a symphonic-scale quilt of Black American styles.

Arvo Pärt at 90

October 23 and 24

Venue: Carnegie Hall

The master of slow, reverent tones gets a two-part tribute from his countrymen, the Estonian Festival Orchestra and Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir.

Les Arts Florissants

October 26

Venue: Frick Museum

Paul Agnew leads the early-music ensemble in a program of works from the 17th and 18th centuries revolving around Jerusalem’s identity as a center of Christianity.

Philharmonia Orchestra

October 28 and 29

Venue: Carnegie Hall

The Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali makes his Carnegie Hall debut leading a work that his country’s plentiful conductors are nurtured on: Sibelius’s Fifth.

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Schubert Cello Quintet

October 28 and 29

Venue: Crypt under the Church of the Intercession

The Parker Quartet and Jay Campbell give Schubert’s dark, profound piece an atmospheric boost by playing it in a place of picturesque spookiness.

J’nai Bridges: ‘La Belle Époque’

October 29

Venue: Gilder Lehrman Hall, Morgan Library

The mezzo-soprano delivers the soundtrack to Renoir’s France while an exhibition of his drawings opens in the galleries.

A Black Masque

November

Venue: Frick Museum

Baritone Davóne Tines and the ensemble Sonnambula interweave European music from the 17th century with African griot sagas, narrating the encounters of continents from both sides.

New York Philharmonic

November 6–8

Venue: Geffen Hall

Dalia Stasevska conducts war music from Ukraine and World War II with Joshua Bell performing Thomas de Hartmann’s violin concerto.

Sean Shibe, guitar

November 7

Venue: 92NY

The guitarist performs on two instruments (classical and electric) and covers several centuries in a recital that includes a Bach suite, Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, and a Thomas Adès premiere.

Kyung Wha Chung, violin

November 7

Venue: Carnegie Hall

With Kevin Kenner at the piano, the violinist glides through sonatas by Debussy, Schoenberg, Schubert, and Franck.

The Ocean Etched in the Forest

November 7

Venue: Alice Tully Hall

In the great tradition of anthropologically minded composers, Du Yun incorporates folk music from the Jinuo people from Yunnan, China, into her own dramatic work.

Composer Portrait: Anthony Cheung

November 13

Venue: Miller Theater

The theater’s one-composer-per-concert series focuses on landscapes of flickering sonorities and small gestures that bloom into big ones.

Sasha Cooke, mezzo-soprano

November 13 and 15

Venue: Board of Officers Room, Park Avenue Armory

The recital program of American love songs ranges across music by Sondheim, Copland, and Barber plus an Armory-commissioned work by Jasmine Barnes.

New York Philharmonic

November 13–16

Venue: Geffen Hall

Nicola Benedetti is the soloist in Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto on a program with a new work by Caroline Mallonee and Stravinsky’s Petrushka, conducted by David Robertson.

Blue

November 15

Venue: Geffen Hall

Three Lincoln Center institutions — the theater, the Metropolitan Opera, and the umbrella organization — join forces to present the 2019 opera about a bereaved family in Harlem, by Jeanine Tesori (whose Grounded opened last season) and librettist Tazewell Thompson.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard and George Benjamin, pianos

November 19

Venue: 92NY

Benjamin is best known as the composer of hushed, intense scores, but now he and one of his major interpreters perform Benjamin’s new work for two pianos.

Andrea Chénier

Opens November 24

Venue: Metropolitan Opera

It’s been more than a decade since Umberto Giordano’s opera of the French Revolution appeared at the Met, and for good reason: It’s tough to find the cast. Now, tenor Piotr Beczala and soprano Sonya Yoncheva justify the return of Nicolas Joël’s production.

Konstantin Krimmel, baritone

December 3, 5, and 7

Venue: 92NY

A baritone of immense expressive force knocks off all three of Schubert’s song cycles — Die Schöne Müllerin, Winterreise, and Schwanengesang — with pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz.

Chamber Orchestra of Europe

December 10

Venue: 92NY

The fiercely virtuosic group zigzags back and forth through the genre’s history, from Dvořák’s G-Major Quartet, Op. 106, to Haydn’s Quartet No. 2 and Bartók’s Quartet No. 4.

Daniil Trifonov recital

December 13

Venue: Carnegie Hall

The Russian pianist, who’s gone from prodigy to phenom to elder all before he’s turned 35, performs works by three compatriots who went on to form the first wave of Soviet composers: Taneyev, Myaskovsky, and Prokofiev.

I Puritani

Opens December 31

Venue: Metropolitan Opera

It’s a double-Bellini season at the Met, which on New Year’s Eve stages its first new production of I Puritani since the Carter administration. This one’s by the director and set designer Charles Edwards, with soprano Lisette Oropesa and tenor Lawrence Brownlee.