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This year’s 2026 Preview consists of all the entertainment — from movies to books to art shows — that Vulture writers and editors are excited to consume in the New Year. Below, our classical-music shows list.
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Pastoral
January 11
Venue: Lincoln Center
In a high-concept meta bait-and-switch, Pam Tanowitz choreographed Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, then swapped out the score for a new para-Pastoral, by Caroline Shaw.
Bruce Liu, piano
February 20
Venue: Carnegie Hall
Anyone (okay, almost nobody) can win the Chopin Piano Competition, but it’s something else to keep winning over the kind of demanding audiences who show up for piano recitals, which Liu has been doing all over the world. He returns to Carnegie Hall with a program that whips around centuries and styles but keeps returning to Spain.
John Williams’s Piano Concerto
February 27
Venue: David Geffen Hall
It’s been three-quarters of a century since the Yoda of movie music played jazz piano in the Air Force, but he hasn’t forgotten. His latest concert work, composed for pianist Emanuel Ax, pays homage to the greats who are not just part of history for this 93-year-old but his contemporaries: Bill Evans, Art Tatum, and Oscar Peterson.
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Tristan und Isolde
March 9
Venue: Metropolitan Opera
In this new production, Wagner’s slow-burn opera gets a jolt of heat from the incandescent soprano Lise Davidsen, who’s been working her way toward the title role for years. It’s directed by the inimitably inventive Yuval Sharon, who once staged an opera in a couple of dozen cars moving around L.A. This Tristan will be comparatively sedentary.
Dudamel conducts Rzewski & Beethoven
March 12
Venue: David Geffen Hall
Two of the most indignant composers in history come together at the New York Philharmonic: Beethoven’s semi-Napoleonic Eroica symphony meets Frederic Rzewski’s formidable piano piece, The People United Will Never Be Defeated, transformed into an orchestral work by a collective of today’s composers.
Innocence
April 6
Venue: Metropolitan Opera
The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died in 2023, wrote music of profoundly shadowed seriousness, and her ironically titled opera of violence and grief joins the genre’s long roster of tragedies. A school shooting is involved, its long tail of aftershocks ennobled by a gorgeously gloomy score. Joyce DiDonato stars.
