It’s that time of year again. All the musical arts organizations have been sending out emails to announce their 2025-26 seasons, hoping to entice us to subscribe. In fact, I get so many of these, I often just wind up scrolling quickly through them or putting them aside for later and then forgetting all about them. Catalogues and brochures that show up in the actual, honest-to-goodness U.S. Post receive closer scrutiny.
For me, computer screens are just so claustrophobic. And inconvenient. I hate having to scroll up and down and click through endless links while trying to compile a fantasy subscription season. I especially dislike when marketers reduce otherwise interesting programs to yawn-inducing teasers such as “Mitsuko Uchida Plays Mozart.” And then you have to click on the link to see if there’s anything else actually worth hearing. Because if you don’t, you just know it’s going to be some opulent, hour-long, fin-de-siècle symphonic poem that will only get programmed once in a lifetime.
For the big orchestras that offer some 130 concerts a season, the whole online process is infuriatingly inconvenient. It’s a waste of my time and it’s not good for my blood pressure.
But I digress. With a quick flash of the middle finger to the marketers, I now move on to the exciting news that it looks like John Williams finally finished his Piano Concerto for Emanuel Ax, as it will be performed by the New York Philharmonic on a series of concerts, February 27 – March 3, 2026, not long after the composer’s 94th birthday (on February 8 ). Ax is slated to give the work its world premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in July.
Why it’s taken Williams so long to get around to writing a concerto for his own instrument is anyone’s guess. Over the past 50 years, he’s written concertos for violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, French horn, tuba, and maybe a few others I’m forgetting, since the works are not always titled “concerto.”
The New York Philharmonic program will also include Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” and Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Symphony No. 5. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla will conduct. The whole prospect is so thrilling that I don’t know how I’m supposed to wait an entire year!
How do the marketers drain all the excitement out of it? They’re titling it “Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla & Emanuel Ax.” That’s guaranteed to get butts in the seats.
Despite their best efforts to keep me away, I will be there.
https://www.nyphil.org/concerts-tickets/2526/mirga-grazinyte-tyla-and-emanuel-ax/
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