NJPAC in Newark

We launch the season with Montgomery’s open-arms musical welcome. In her Hymn for Everyone you’ll hear an echo of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the Black National Anthem.

Slammed as a flop at its premiere, Tchaikovsky more than had the last laugh: here’s jaw-dropping virtuosity for the soloist, sweeping melodies for the orchestra, and an audience favorite around the world.

Dvořák’s pen might as well have been a paint brush. In his tuneful Eighth you can practically see autumn’s most vivid colors and the heart-melting glow of an October sunset.

Eight minutes that saved a nation. When Finland wrestled itself free from the Russian bear, Sibelius’ music was the Finns’ call to courage.

The most gorgeous violin concerto of the 20th century: the first two movements exquisitely touching, and the third a wild sprint for only the bravest of soloists.

Three Ukrainian folksongs were all Tchaikovsky needed for inspiration. From them, he spun his most joyful symphony.

It begins with the strings alone playing a whisperquiet passage of holy serenity. Soon the whole orchestra joins and builds in a full-throated cry. Wagner’s operatic stage is set for the arrival of the knight Lohengrin sent on a mission from God.

Time for Three, a self-described “classically trained garage band,” brings you the GRAMMY Award-winning concerto written for them by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts. Created during the isolation of the early pandemic, Contact is “an expression of yearning for the fundamental need” of human connection.

Four notes—dah, dah, dah, DAH—launched Beethoven’s Fifth in 1808 and have stamped all of western classical music since.

A lovingly lush hymn to the charms of summer, written just before Webern helped stand traditional classical music on its head.

It opens with a wisp of melancholy Russian folksong and closes with castanets and Spanish flair, creating fireworks for a world-class violinist and orchestra.

Orchestras love this ode to “A Hero’s Life” for its bold, voluptuous sweep, created by Strauss as a musical pat on his own back.

The music swells and surges just as the waves off Scotland’s coast carried the young Mendelssohn past moody cliffs and caves and sent him reaching for his score paper.

Though called a “symphony,” this is where superstar Joshua Bell stands and lets his Stradivarius violin sing the silvery songs of Spain.

“The jolliest piece I’ve ever done,” wrote an ecstatic young Mendelssohn to his parents back in Berlin, after arriving in Italy and falling in love with its sunshine, sidewalk tunes, coast, and effervescent colors—all of which he poured into his Fourth Symphony.