Yo-Yo Ma! Joyce DiDonato! Leonidas Kavakos! Leila Josefowicz! The Minnesota Orchestra will be keeping some pretty impressive company during Thomas Søndergård’s third season as music director.
Minnesota Orchestra’s 2025-26 season includes cellist Yo-Yo Ma, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato
Violinists Leonidas Kavakos, mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton and pianist Kirill Gerstein are also among the musicians slated to perform with the orchestra next season.
For the Minnesota Star Tribune
March 18, 2025 at 11:00AM
Tickets are now on sale for this year’s Summer at Orchestra Hall and the 2025-26 season. If you want to spread out your visits, here are the most eye- and ear-catching concerts for each month from July through June 2026.
July: Summer at Orchestra Hall runs July 10-Aug. 1, and is once again hosted by irrepressible pianist Jon Kimura Parker. He’ll be the soloist for Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto on a program that also features Samuel Lee leading the orchestra in music by Felix Mendelssohn and Peter Tchaikovsky (July 25).
August: Parker closes the summer season with Edvard Grieg’s flamboyant Piano Concerto, sandwiched between Akiko Fujimoto conducting works by Johannes Brahms and Antonín Dvořák (Aug. 1).
September: What a way to open the season! One of the opera world’s most celebrated singers, multi-Grammy-winning mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, will join Søndergård and the orchestra for a song cycle by Hector Berlioz. Søndergård also conducts works by Leonard Bernstein, Guillaume Connesson and Richard Strauss (Sept. 18-19).
October: The star power continues to shine when Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos returns to solo on a Mozart violin concerto and conduct a Dmitri Shostakovich symphony (Oct. 10-11). And English conductor Andrew Manze will lead the orchestra in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, as well as Benjamin Britten’s “Sinfonia da Requiem” and Anna Clyne’s piano concerto, “Atlas,” with Elisabeth Brauss as soloist (Oct. 16-18).
November: After rapper Dessa returns to perform with conductor Sarah Hicks and the orchestra (Nov. 7-8), Søndergård leads an ambitious fortnight full of large-scale works, including Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” (Nov. 13-14, with Benjamin Beilman soloing on a Karol Szymanowski violin concerto) and Brahms’ “A German Requiem” (Nov. 21-22).
December: The holiday programming is bookended by Delyana Lazarova conducting music by Caroline Shaw, Joseph Haydn and Dvořák (Dec. 4-5) and a New Year’s Eve and Day program of music by Michael Tilson Thomas, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and Aaron Diehl soloing on a piano concerto written for him by Timo Andres (Dec. 31-Jan. 1).
January: This past January’s Nordic Soundscapes Festival was such a success that Søndergård and the orchestra are going to get all hygge with it again, presenting music from five European countries that abut the Arctic. Two-time Grammy-winning violinist James Ehnes will be the soloist for Jean Sibelius’ Violin Concerto (Jan. 8-9) and some chamber music (Jan. 10).
February: In addition to the Houston Symphony’s Juraj Valčuha conducting music by Bernard Herrmann, Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff (Feb. 13-14), conductor laureate Osmo Vänskä will join his wife, the orchestra’s concertmaster, Erin Keefe, for Sergei Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, and conduct works by Missy Mazzoli and Igor Stravinsky (Feb. 19-20).
March 2026: The world’s most famous cellist, Yo-Yo Ma (loved you in the 2022 “Knives Out” flick, Yo-Yo), will join Søndergård and the orchestra for Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto, on an all-English program that also features music by William Walton, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Britten (March 3). But it’s a terrific month, with visits from pianists Kirill Gerstein (March 13-14) and Inon Barnatan (March 27-29) and the San Francisco Opera’s Eun Sun Kim conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (March 19-21).
April 2026: Another major star of the classical world, violinist Leila Josefowicz, solos on John Adams’ Violin Concerto, the program also features John Storgårds conducting works by George Antheil and Tchaikovsky (April 9-10).
May 2026: Søndergård tends to like it big, so let’s see what he does with music by opera’s most long-winded composer, Richard Wagner, and a concert version of Béla Bartók’s opera, “Bluebeard’s Castle” (May 8-9).
June 2026: A season that started with one magnificent mezzo-soprano nears its end with another, Jamie Barton, who will solo on Peter Lieberson’s beautiful “Neruda Songs.” Søndergård also will conduct Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony (June 4-6).
Ticket packages of three or more concerts are on sale and can be purchased at minnesotaorchestra.org or by calling 612-371-5656. Single tickets for the 2025-26 season will be available on July 29. For select concerts, those ages 6 to 18 can attend for free.
Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.
Critics’ picks for entertainment in the week ahead.
