National Philharmonic Announces 2026-2027 Season

NatPhil to present East Coast Premiere of Jocelyn Hagen’s ‘What the Soul Already Knows’

Season features music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Aaron Copland, Antonín Dvořák, George Frideric Handel, Laura Karpman, Arturo Márquez, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn, and Joan TowerGuest artists include Inon Barnatan, Ava Pakiam, Aundi Marie Moore, Danielle Talamantes, and Jorell WilliamsBrian Ganz launches a multi-year Beethoven Piano Sonata Cycle

(WASHINGTON, DC) - National Philharmonic (NatPhil) today unveils its 2026-27 season, a bold seven-program journey spanning contemporary voices and timeless masterworks. The season features the East Coast premiere of Jocelyn Hagen’s What the Soul Already Knows. All concerts will take place at The Music Center at Strathmore, the Orchestra’s longstanding home in Montgomery County. 

“Our concerts are rooted in community and designed to inspire and belong to those we serve,” says Jim Kelly, President and CEO of National Philharmonic and a member of its Artistic Leadership Committee. “We are sharing music that we find instills a lifelong love of classical music. We are proud to present these compelling artists and composers who continually remind us why this art form matters. We know our audiences will have a wonderful time,” he adds.

In 2026-27, NatPhil welcomes a roster of accomplished artists, including pianist Inon Barnatan, violinist Ava Pakiam, and vocal artists Aundi Marie Moore, Danielle Talamantes, and Jorell Williams. Concerts will be led by distinguished guest conductors David Charles Abell, Anthony Blake Clark, Daniel Hege, Carolyn Kuan, Chia-Hsuan Lin, and Eugene Rogers.“

This upcoming season is infused with a spirit of discovery for us and the audience,” explains NatPhil violinist and Concert Leader Laura Colgate, who also serves on the NatPhil Artistic Leadership Committee. “Each program reflects a distinct facet of our artistic identity. In addition, we’re collaborating with six outstanding conductors across our season, each of whom will draw out a different dimension of the orchestra. By the end of the season, we’ll have arrived at a greater understanding of who we are as an ensemble and as a community,” she adds.

Conceived as the ultimate love letter to classical music, NatPhil’s Artistic Leadership Committee selected beloved cornerstone repertoire and compelling contemporary works for the season. The season opens with Inon Barnatan performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3. The programming continues with music by Aaron Copland, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Laura Karpman’s All American – propelled by a percussion battery of baking sheet, butcher block, Le Creuset 5-quart braiser and other kitchen tools – calls attention to the pervasive invisibility of women composers, quoting the melodies of three of them: Emily Wood Bower, Mildred J. Hill, and Anita Owen. In Made in America, Joan Tower draws from America the Beautiful as a main theme to survey American promise through the eyes of an expat.

The May program spotlights NatPhil’s partnership with The Washington Chorus under the direction of Dr. Eugene Rogers. The two ensembles will collaborate on the East Coast premiere of Jocelyn Hagen’s What the Soul Already Knows, co-commissioned with Pacific Chorale under the direction of Robert Istad. The performance features Soprano Rabihah Dunn, Mezzo-Soprano Ashley Dixon, Tenor Brian Giebler, and Bass-Baritone Alan Williams. The libretto is anchored by “The Circle,” an expansive poem by Ty Defoe, a Two-Spirit Native American writer and interdisciplinary artist.

In December, Baltimore Choral Arts Society joins NatPhil in its annual holiday tradition of performing George Frideric Handel’s Messiah, HWV 56, conducted by Anthony BlakeClark and featuring Soprano Sarah Hayashi, Mezzo-Soprano Lucia Bradford, Tenor Allan Palacios Chan, and Bass-Baritone Edmund Milly.

Building on the landmark "Extreme Chopin" project with NatPhil at Strathmore, in which pianist Brian Ganz played all 250+ works by Frédéric Chopin, Ganz launches a new multi-year cycle of the Beethoven piano sonatas, further deepening NatPhil’s commitment to immersive, long-term artistic exploration. 

National Philharmonic 2026-2027 Season Schedule: 

Saturday, Sept. 20, 7:30 PM
The Music Center at Strathmore

Carolyn Kuan, Conductor
Inon Barnatan, Piano

• Laura Karpman: All American

• Ludwig van Beethoven: Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37

• Antonín Dvořák: Symphony No.9, op.95, B.178, E minor “From the New World” 

Saturday, Nov. 7, 7:30 PM
The Music Center at Strathmore
Daniel Hege, Conductor
Danielle Talamantes, Soprano

• Joan Tower: Made in America

• Samuel Barber: Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24 

• George Gershwin: The Man I Love

• George Gershwin: Love Is Here to Stay

• Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring Suite

• Arturo Márquez: Danzón No. 2

Saturday, Dec. 18, 7:30 PM
Sunday, Dec. 19, 3 PM
The Music Center at Strathmore

Anthony Blake Clark, ConductorSarah Hayashi, SopranoLucia Bradford, Mezzo-SopranoAllan Palacios Chan, TenorEdmund Milly, Bass-Baritone

with Baltimore Choral Arts Society

• George Frideric Handel: Messiah, HWV 56 (abridged with intermission)

Saturday, Feb. 20, 7:30 PM
The Music Center at Strathmore

David Charles Abell, Conductor
Aundi Marie Moore, Soprano
Ginger Costa-Jackson, Mezzo-Soprano
Andres Acosta, Tenor
Jorell Williams, Baritone

• Great moments from opera 

Saturday, March 13, 7:30 PM
The Music Center at Strathmore

Chia-Hsuan Lin, Conductor
Ava Pakiam, Violin

• Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel: Overture, C major

• Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Concerto, Violin, Op.35, TH 59, D major

• Felix Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 3, Op. 56, A Minor (Scottish)

Saturday, April 10, 7:30 PM
The Music Center at Strathmore

Brian Ganz, Piano

• An immersive series exploring Beethoven’s piano sonatas

Saturday, May 8, 7:30 PM
The Music Center at Strathmore
In partnership with The Washington Chorus

Eugene Rogers, Conductor
Rabihah Dunn, Soprano
Ashley Dixon, Mezzo Soprano
Brian Giebler, Tenor
Alan Williams, Bass-baritone

• Jocelyn Hagen: What the Soul Already Knows, East Coast Premiere

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Requiem in D minor, K. 626 (completed by Süssmayr)

Programs, artists, dates, and times are subject to change. 

Subscription and Ticket Information 
Subscriptions and packages to National Philharmonic’s 2026-2027 season are on sale now at nationalphilharmonic.org. Single tickets will go on sale in July.

About the National Philharmonic
Celebrated for showcasing world-renowned guest artists in time-honored symphonic masterpieces, National Philharmonic (NatPhil) continuously strives to create remarkable educational opportunities in the community while promoting diversity and representation in classical music.

NatPhil was formed in 1985 as the Montgomery Chamber Orchestra, later becoming the National Chamber Orchestra. In 2005, it merged with Masterworks Chorus to become National Philharmonic, and took up residence at The Music Center at Strathmore, where it still performs.

The National Philharmonic is an accessible, enriching component in the Greater Washington DC Metropolitan Area, believing that music has the power to spark imagination and shape the world around us. Over the years, National Philharmonic has expanded its footprint with year-round masterclasses along with Summer String Institutes for youth, a Youth Mentorship Program, and partnerships with other arts and community organizations. In addition to these programs, National Philharmonic fosters a love of music in young people across the region by offering free admission to all children ages 7 to 17. nationalphilharmonic.org

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Media Contact:

Allison Van Etten
Vice President
8VA Music Consultancy
323.449.5030
allison@8vamusicconsultancy.com

Le Devoir: YulianNa Avdeeva Performs with Montreal Symphony Orchestra

Yulianna Avdeeva, the Gold Medalist of the 2010 International Chopin Piano Competition, appeared last week with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, performing Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Australian conductor Simone Young. Reviewing the concert for the French-language newspaper Le Devoir, critic Christophe Huss writes:

In Chopin’s First Piano Concerto, conductor and soloist were perfectly in sync. Avdeeva is certainly not one to mince words: she conducts with precision, finesse, and great musicality. Her perfectly polished performance of the concerto is concise and to the point: the playing is fluid, crystalline, and limpid, devoid of any artifice... The result is an impeccable concert that gets to the heart of the music without losing its way. We love it.

Read the full review here.

Pianist Élisabeth Pion Named Musical America’s New Artist of the Month

Last fall, Canadian pianist Élisabeth Pion was named Gold Laureate of the 2025 Honens International Piano Competition, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious awards of its kind. The coveted Honens Gold carries a C$100,000 prize along with a three-year artist development program designed to launch an international career.

“Hearing Élisabeth Pion’s account of the Third Prokofiev Concerto with the Calgary Philharmonic, I was struck by her bright but controlled energy—dazzling without strain, lyrical yet spiced with attitude and wit,” writes Thomas May, profiling Pion, who is Musical America’s New Artist of the Month. “She moved easily among Prokofiev’s contesting moods without resorting to mannerism. The technique never drew attention to itself but was simply there, in service of a personal way of playing that convinced me she had something to say about this ultra-familiar score.”

Recently turned 30, Pion grew up in Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec, and began piano early, but only committed to it professionally in her late teens, after pursuing interests beyond music. She went on to study in Montréal before moving to London, where she is now based, completing her training at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

This month, Pion presents several recitals in Canada, performs Mendelssohn’s First Concerto with the Orchestre symphonique de Québec, and a program of Beethoven concertos with the Arion Orchestre Baroque — a collaboration that will culminate in a complete Beethoven concerto cycle on disc, to be released by the end of 2027. More immediately, June brings a recording of Ravel’s G major Concerto and a solo album on the Steinway & Sons label.

Looking back on the past year, Pion admits: “You win a big competition, and honestly, you feel a bit lost. After so many years in the circuit, you wonder: what did you aim for?” What matters most, she suggests, is maintaining a sense of development.

Read the full piece here.

Shepherd School of Music Featured in OperaWire

On April 17, the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University raised the curtain on its mainstage production of Verdi’s comedic opus Falstaff. Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the school has grown from its inception as Rice’s music department through the support of community partnerships and donors, and has developed into a vibrant and effective center of musical education and collaboration.

Logan Martell traveled to Shepherd to explore the campus, speak with the faculty and students, and experience Falstaff. “It became clear that there was truly something special to be found there,” he reports for OperaWire.

“During my time on campus, it was not uncommon to glimpse classes or various practice, with students learning from truly renowned artists,” he says. “Without naming names, some of these I recognized from shows I have seen at places including the Metropolitan Opera. Leading the school since 2021, Dean Matthew Loden provided much insight on Shepherd’s recipe for success as we spoke and walked the building.”

Loden said:

I think over the 50 years of our history, the secret of our success is that we’ve maintained a very narrow focus. We’ve decided that there’s only a handful of things we want to do, but we want to do them better than anybody else, and we want to, wherever possible, avoid any kind of institutional drift — where the mission gets complicated or messy. What are the points of light that we need to pay attention to? [What do we need to do] in a different fashion to help amplify what we’re already doing for the benefit of the students and faculty that are here?”

Read Martell's piece here.

NYCR: Parlando wraps season with a laudable encore of cabaret music

Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, conductor Ian Niederhoffer, and Parlando (Crios Photography)

From smoky Berlin nightclubs to today’s jazz clubs, cabaret walks the line between satire and story. In the season-ending concert by the New York-based chamber orchestra Parlando, the music “was full of style, expression and historical and social significance,” writes New York Classical Review. Conducted by founder Ian Niederhoffer, the April 22 concert was the second of a two-season collaboration with soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, exploring cabaret’s blend of sharp-edged social commentary and deeply personal storytelling. The program included Ernst Krenek’s jazzy Fantasie on Jonny spielt auf, Hanns Eisler’s punchy Kleine Sinfonie, Abel Meeropol’s haunting Strange Fruit, and the world premiere orchestration of Aaron Davis’s Zombie Blizzard.

Niederhoffer pinned modern cabaret music to the impact American military bands—notably James Reese Europe’s Harlem Hellfighters—had in Europe during WWI, explaining it as a mix of jazz and modern classical.

On Strange Fruit:

Brueggergosman-Lee was a welcome sight on stage to begin with, and she sang this with terrific musicality and pinpoint expression. Her sound had a rich throatiness, and she modulated it through each verse, pinching the last words into a kind of serrated blade. Moved out of the cabaret and into the concert hall, this was a superb set piece, a demonstration that art songs can and should be meant for the public.

On Zombie Blizzard:

As songs, each had a fine, masterful shape that followed the direction of the text and found natural heights and endpoints. The larger-scale form was also excellent, the entire thing following a clear journey from self-possession to a moving expression of how life feels after those around us pass on.

Read the full piece here.

Anne-Marie McDermott on Southern Arizona's PBS and NPR

On May 1, Anne-Marie McDermott, one of the most dazzling American pianists of her generation, will perform a program of music by Haydn and Brahms, with the audience joining her on stage at the University of Arizona’s Centennial Hall. Michael Dauphinais, from AZPM, Southern Arizona's PBS and NPR Station, recently talked with McDermott on the show Extempore about her program, the art of practicing, and being an arts administrator, among other things.

“I take the concept of ‘the greater the discipline, the greater the freedom’ really to heart,” McDermott said,

and I make my practicing as difficult as possible so that when I walk onstage, what I want to do in that moment is share what I'm so in love with: this music. That’s what I want to do. I don't want to be thinking about this passage or that passage; I just want to communicate the music. And the way to do that is through very disciplined practice.

Listen to the full radio segment here.

To find out more about the performance and get your tickets, click here.

Sandbox Percussion Brings "Canto Ostinato" to Emerald City Music

Sandbox Percussion, the exciting New York-based group at the forefront of contemporary music for percussion, performed Canto Ostinato at Seattle’s Emerald City Music. Written by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt (1923-2012), Canto Ostinato is a classic of Minimalism that emerged alongside much better-known masterpieces in a similar style, particularly Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. The April 10 performance was part of Sandbox’s residency this season with Emerald City Music, under the artistic direction of Kristin Lee.

The project is a collaboration between multi-instrumentalist and arranger Erik Hall and Sandbox Percussion, with an expanded ensemble of winds, strings, and additional percussion assembled through the new-music collective Metropolis Ensemble. The 16 musicians included faculty and students from the University of Washington School of Music, with Hall at the piano, and winds, strings and an expanded percussion group anchored by the four Sandbox members.

Critic Tom May reports:

This fuller chamber setting gave the internal workings of ten Holt’s design a new, more textured dimension. Small dissonances — sometimes absorbed in the keyboard original — emerged with sharper profile, introducing moments of piquant friction, while carefully calibrated swells and ebbs gave the larger ensemble passages an oceanic breadth, like the breathing of a single organism.

Read the full piece here.

(Photos by Carliln Ma)

SFCV: Anne Akiko Meyers and LACO’s Tribute to L.A.

The idea of fire fueled a rich, moving, and healing program of new and old music that the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra presented at Colburn Conservatory’s Zipper Hall on April 11, featuring violinist Anne Akiko Meyers and music director Jaime Martin.

Meyers performed Eric Whitacre’s The Pacific Has No Memory, for violin and strings, with which the composer and the soloist commemorate the Pacific Palisades and Altadena fires of January 2025. A Southern California native, Meyers spoke eloquently from the stage of her chaotic post-fire life of moving between hotels “with a family and a crazy dog and my violin.” Her polished, refined, and intonationally pure playing was the highlight of the evening, reports Harlow Robinson for San Francisco Classical Voice.

Inspired by an image of the Pacific as a source of endless renewal from his favorite film, The Shawshank Redemption, Whitacre’s work gives the violin a keening melody that rises and falls like the waves. Gramophone praised the “glowing steadiness” of Meyers’s performance on a recording of the piece she made recently with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which gave the world premiere at Carnegie Hall last spring. The piece appears destined to become a lasting memorial to L.A.’s recovery.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ soothing and soaring The Lark Ascending came between the two new works in the first half. Here, Meyers’s bowing technique — which she made look so easy — produced a flowing, liquid tone, a seamless stream of sound that along with her pitch-perfect fingering held the audience spellbound.

Read the full review here.

The Strad: Rachel Barton Pine bridges classic repertoire and contemporary realities

On April 11, the acclaimed concert violinist Rachel Barton Pine, celebrated for her dazzling technique and lustrous tone, appeared at the Los Alamos Concert Association in New Mexico, with pianist Matthew Hagle. The recital consisted of selections from Pine’s Blue Dialogues: Music by Black Composers album. It was a “high spirited and high minded” program, writes Richard Linnett for The Strad, “intentionally and cautiously hopeful in the teeth of turbulent times.”

The artist was fragile yet strong, angelic and earthy, a teacher, mother and a very bright light; she entertained her audience while teaching lessons of kindness, acceptance and healing through great music.

Read the full piece here.

Bachtrack: Yulianna Avdeeva Performs with the Pittsburgh Symphony

Star pianist Yulianna Avdeeva, gold medalist of the 2010 International Chopin Piano Competition, performed Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Pittsburgh Symphony on April 10-12. “The electric chemistry between conductor, orchestra and soloist ensured this wasn’t merely an exercise in bombast, but a night of compelling music-making,” writes Sam Jacobson for Bachtrack.

Among the great piano concertos, Prokofiev’s Second stands out as a particularly taxing and unrelenting affair. This weekend the daunting challenge fell to Yulianna Avdeeva. A gentle, unassuming opening belied its scope, with the piano grave and searching at first, gingerly exploring the keyboard ahead of the fury. Matters quickly grew in intensity, with Avdeeva drawing a wide color palette and deep resonance from the Steinway. The jagged edges of the massive cadenza resounded with enormous power and percussiveness.

In about the only moment of subtlety of the evening, the pianist encored with a limpid, elegant account of Schubert’s charming Moment musical no. 3 in F minor.

Read the full review here.

Yulianna Avdeeva (credit: Kevin Kinzley)