Jazz is America’s greatest indigenous artform. BSO Artistic Partner Wordsmith will lead us on a journey to discover the joys of jazz in the concert hall and its link to Baltimore history in this multimedia presentation of iconic works by Billie Holiday, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and many more.

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Midweek: Jazzing The Symphony

Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall

Recharge your flux capacitor...and get ready to celebrate this unforgettable movie classic as you’ve never seen and heard it before! Back to the Future is the 1.21-gigawattblockbuster that topped the 1985 box office chart, spawned two wildly successful sequels and stamped an enduring imprint on pop culture. Join Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and a time traveling DeLorean for the adventure of a lifetime as they travel to the past, present and future, setting off a time-shattering chain reaction that disrupts the space-time continuum! Now, fans old and new will experience the thrill of Back to the Future like never before–on a big hi-def screen with a full symphony orchestra performing Alan Silvestri’s dazzling musical score live in synch with the movie. Audiences will also be in for an exclusive treat: approximately 20 minutes of brand-new music added by award-winning composer Silvestri to the film’s score specially for these unique live orchestra presentations.

Back To The Future In Concert

The Music Center at Strathmore

Jun Märkl conducts the music of fellow German Richard Strauss with “fire and finesse” (The Baltimore Sun), bringing out the immense emotions in Strauss’ portrait of the life of an artist. A rarely heard gem from early in the career of France’s maven of mysticism, The Resplendent Tomb proves how well Messiaen soaked up the wisdom of his teacher, Paul Dukas (of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice fame). BSO’s Principal Clarinet YaoGuang Zhai frolics through the convivial concerto that Mozart wrote for a dear friend, and Gabriela Lena Frank imagines guiding her hero Benjamin Britten through the Peru of her ancestors. 

Mozart Clarinet Concerto

Maria Broom and a BSO String Quartet will be featured in this family friendly program. Get ready to learn about life down on the farm through songs about your favorite animals including cows, sheep, and horses.

Farm Animals

AMP by Strathmore

The sensational Capathia Jenkins brings her powerhouse voice to a wide-ranging revue of R&B classics and soulful hits. Featuring music from Toni Braxton, Adele, Stevie Wonder, and more. The dynamic Canadian conductor Lucas Waldin leads the program.

She’s Got Soul

From the impassioned minor-key symphony he wrote at 17 to his crowning symphonic achievement named for the king of the Roman gods, Mozart’s scores for orchestra are as faultless and brilliant as sparkling diamonds. Pianist Yulianna Avdeeva, First Prize winner at the 2010 International Chopin Piano Competition, joins the BSO to play Mozart’s dynamic Piano Concerto No. 23, packing an opera’s worth of dialogue and excitement into three vivacious movements.

Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Celebrate the holidays with the  BSO and Holiday Spectacular. Byron Stripling is joined by the Baltimore  Choral Arts Society for a program featuring your favorite holiday music. Plus, the ever-popular tap-dancing Santas return to the stage.

Holiday Spectacular

The audience’s favorite holiday program, Cirque Nutcracker returns with Troupe Vertigo’s acrobats, jugglers, and high-flying aerialists. They join the BSO for a spectacular twist on Tchaikovsky’s holiday classic The Nutcracker. Make this performance a part of your holiday tradition today!

Cirque Nutcracker

Celebrate the holidays with brilliant Baroque music sure to stir the soul and lift the spirit. Rejoice with treasures from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Handel’s Messiah, and more with Baroque masters at their most irrepressibly joyful and effervescent.

Baroque Christmas

Discover the Magic of the Mean One this holiday season. Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas is a celebration of the holiday spirit no home should be without! Why is the Grinch such a grouch? No one seems to know, until little Cindy Lou Who takes matters into her own hands and turns both Whoville and the Grinch’s world upside down, inside out and funny side up in her search for the true meaning of Christmas.

How The Grinch Stole Christmas In Concert

These Russian-born composers charted routes of resistance and freedom that still resonate today. Tchaikovsky, secretly gay and openly enraptured with the music of the West, poured his love and anguish into the Violin Concerto that mixed Russian intensity into the impeccable traditions of the Classical masters. Stravinsky, untested and overlooked in his home country, astonished the crowds in Paris with his supernatural ballet based on the Russian fairy tales of the Firebird. Lera Auerbach, who defected from the Soviet Union as a teenage prodigy, has matured into an experienced talent who pulls no punches.

Stravinsky’s The Firebird

BSYO String, Concert and Youth Orchestra

The eminent pianist Emanuel Ax—performs Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 which remains the standard-bearer of Brahms for our times, consistently exhibiting his “big and pliant sonority, stamina, intelligence, poetic feeling and deep musicality.” (Chicago Tribune) Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony channels the impish wit of his onetime teacher Haydn, while Unsuk Chin’s subito con forza riffs on a phrase from Beethoven over the course of five frenetic minutes.

Ax Plays Brahms

The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center

Broadway never sounded better. Ted Sperling conducts the BSO and an all-star cast of vocalists including Hugh Panaro (The Phantom of the Opera), Dee Roscioli (Wicked), and Scarlett Strallen (Singin’ in the Rain). Featuring numbers from your favorite Broadway performances new and old, this is a celebration of song you will not want to miss!

Broadway Legends

Host Maria Broom and an ensemble of flute, viola and harp will lead your family through a program exploring musical notes and numbers. We’ll dance around playfully as we count, sing, and bounce.

1-2-3 Count With Me

Peggy and Yale Gordon Center For Performing Arts

Conductor Rune Bergmann scales the vast, shimmering expanse of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony (listed as one of the 20 greatest symphonies of all times by BBC Music Magazine), an ode to Richard Wagner that infuses that operatic legend’s breadth and intensity (and even his custom-designed Wagner tubas) into a grand symphonic tapestry. Bringing the effervescent Concerto for Two Pianos that Mozart first played with his sister, the identical twin pianists Christina and Michelle Naughton show off their “extraordinary and satisfying rapport” and their ability “to finish each other’s sentences instinctively.”

Bergmann Conducts Mozart And Bruckner

Conductor David Danzmayr returns to the BSO with his heart on his sleeve, leading a program capped by the First Symphony that Sibelius suffused with the hypnotic melodies and rhythms of Finnish folk poetry. Adapting an ancient Greek play, Samuel Barber, famous for the gut-wrenching Adagio for Strings, channels a mother’s love and grief in a work that lets loose the enormous sonic and emotional range of soprano Christine Goerke. Anna Clyne brings her characteristic grasp of tone color and emotion in a work inspired by two sensuous poems.

Sibelius Symphony No. 1

What makes music scary? Is it loud noises, screechy sounds, or the “tap-tap-tap” of skeleton footsteps? Join the BSO and award-winning children’s author Anna Celenza for an afternoon of thrilling classics featuring witches, trolls, wizards, and monsters.

Music To Give You Goosebumps

Grammy and Tony-nominated actor and musician Michael Cavanaugh joins the BSO for a high-octane performance featuring the greatest hits of two classic rock legends, Billy Joel and Elton John! Cavanaugh, who recreated the music of Billy Joel in Broadway's musical Movin’ Out delivers electrifying renditions of your favorite songs from these legends including “Rocket Man”, “Yellow Brick Road”, “Piano Man”, and “Just the Way You Are”.

Music Of Billy Joel  And Elton John

Adventure waits as your family is whisked away to enjoy a musical safari of elephants, giraffes, lions and zebras. Get ready to rock and roll with the BSO Percussion section and host Maria Broom.

On Safari

BlackRock Center for the Arts

Fran Lebowitz is an American author, public speaker, and occasional actor. She is known for her sardonic social commentary on American life as filtered through her New York City sensibilities. The New York Times has called her a modern-day Dorothy Parker.

An Evening With Fran Lebowitz

No one ever channeled the noble spirit of England with as much sweetness and pathos as Vaughan Williams, and no one understands that better than his compatriot (and president of the Vaughan Williams Society) Sir Andrew Davis. Grieg tinged his suave Piano Concerto with the icy chill and hallowed history of Norway, a piece perfectly suited to Alessio Bax, who plays with “an ease, precision and beauty so seemingly effortless that the music appeared to live and breathe of its own volition.” (The New York Times) This musical travelogue begins with an idyllic country scene from Delius, a worldly Romantic.

Grieg Piano Concerto In A Minor

Jonathon Heyward celebrates his arrival as Music Director with vibrant studies of the United States, culminating with Dvořák’s epic Ninth Symphony (“From the New World”) that draws on spirituals and indigenous melodies. Gershwin’s feisty concerto brings the excitement of the Jazz Age into the concert hall, featuring the “brilliant and stylish pianist” Jean-Yves Thibaudet whose interpretation is “alive with incisive rhythms, Ravelian colorings, telling intricacy, and refreshingly cool restraint” (The New York Times). Baltimore’s own James Lee III taps into Black and Native traditions in his evocative answer to Dvořák’s American vision.

New World Symphony With Heyward

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra launches Music Director Jonathon Heyward’s historic tenure in an expansive three-day celebration spanning our two year-round homes. Members of the Dance Theatre of Harlem join Jonathon and the Orchestra in a program that uplifts the performing arts through a powerful vision of ballet alongside captivating music. All attendees are invited to join us for a post-concert after party.

Baltimore Symphony

7 - 8 Feb, 2024

Midweek: Jazzing The Symphony

26 - 28 Jan, 2024

Back To The Future In Concert

Baltimore Symphony