Spotlight on Classical Music Across 2025–26

A feast for the ears across orchestra and recital series!

By Janet E. Bedell, Cal Performances-commissioned writer

Cal Performances’ 2025–26 season offers a robust selection of classical music performances across recital, chamber, and orchestra formats, that collectively serves as a powerful reminder of just how relevant and resonant these core masterworks remain to this day. Below, you’ll find a deep-dive on five classical recitals and one orchestra performance, each of which offers something distinct, reflected in both the repertoire and in the unique interpretive talents and virtuosity of the artists bringing these works to life.

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One of America’s truly multifaceted artists—attested to by his being selected as a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow—Jeremy Denk makes his return to Cal Performances. With a wide-ranging repertoire, he is especially renowned for his performances of J.S. Bach; his recording of the Goldberg Variations reached No. 1 on the Billboard Classical Charts, while his performance of the Well-Tempered Klavier, Book I was one of the highlights of the Cal Performances at Home 20–21 digital season.

Among Bach’s greatest keyboard masterpieces is the modestly named First Clavier Ubung (“Keyboard Exercises”), which comprise the six keyboard partitas—his ultimate demonstration of the Baroque dance suite form. Usually, we get to hear one or two of these on a concert, but Denk’s performance offers the rare opportunity to hear all six in a single evening! These are immensely challenging pieces in terms of technical difficulty as well as artistic depth. Bach takes the standard Baroque dances—allemandes, courantes, sarabands, and gigues—and rings ingenious changes on them. Each partita has its own personality, established in its opening movement; some are predominantly light and fast, while others, like the great Nos. 4 and 6, are rich and meditative. There are standout movements throughout, such as No. 6’s magnificent opening Toccata (the last he wrote), with a length and complexity that makes it a complete piece unto itself; and the spectacular Gigue closing No. 4, a high-speed fugue that grows into a double fugue. Bach’s first biographer J.N. Forkel claimed, “He who has learnt to play a few of them could make his fortune.”

The revered Italian conductor Riccardo Muti became the Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2010, making this renowned orchestra a pacesetter among America’s Big Five orchestras. With the 2024–25 season, he has transitioned to the post of Music Director Emeritus for Life, continuing one of this country’s legendary artistic partnerships.

Muti brings a well-balanced musical feast to Zellerbach in which the main course is followed by an aperitif, and then dessert. Known for his mastery of Brahms repertoire, he has chosen Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, the composer’s last and arguably greatest, to open the program. The famous Hans von Bülow, who co-conducted with the composer for the Fourth’s first performances in 1885, called it “stupendous,…individual and rocklike. Incomparable strength from start to finish.” This symphony boasts Brahms’ most uninhibited, joyful scherzo, as well as the magnificent passacaglia finale, which builds 30 wondrous variations over a theme Brahms borrowed from Bach. The aperitif is Stravinsky’s ballet The Fairy’s Kiss, based on a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. Stravinsky was a shape-shifter throughout his long career—sometimes a radical modernist, at others, an ironic neo-Classicist. Here, he revealed his surprising lifelong love of Tchaikovsky by creating a ballet that borrows from some of Tchaikovsky’s little-known piano pieces alongside Stravinsky’s own imitations of the older composer’s style, complete with Tchaikovsky’s characteristic melodic gestures and overall Romantic sweep. The dessert is Ravel’s immortal Boléro, an intoxicating exploration of a single boléro rhythm and two closely related exotic melodies.

Making her debut at Cal Performances, American mezzo Samantha Hankey—boasting a rich, bronze-toned voice combined with dramatic prowess—is an exciting young rising star. Already in high demand by opera houses and concert halls in Europe, she achieved wider fame in America in 2023 when she sang Octavian in Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier opposite Lise Davidsen at the Metropolitan Opera in a performance featured on the Met’s Live in HD series. Debuting recently at Carnegie Hall, Hankey also has devoted herself to lieder programs that are refreshingly off the beaten track.

At Cal Performances, she will sing Schumann’s cornerstone cycle Dichterliebe (“A Poet’s Love”) song cycle. While Dichterliebe is often associated with male voices (tenors and baritones), the fact that it was dedicated to a soprano shows that it was conceived with the possibility of female voices performing it in mind. Surrounding this beloved staple of German Romantic lieder will be songs in three languages by a selection of 20th-century composers—Poulenc, Satie, Schoenberg, Weill, and Cole Porter—who mostly come from the worlds of jazz, cabaret, and Broadway. We’ll hear an unexpected side of Schoenberg in the light-hearted “Gigerlette” from his early Brettl-Lieder inspired by the risqué Berlin cabaret style. Another surprise is “Boum!,” a vivacious tongue-twister by French singer-composer Charles Trenet. Like Trenet, master American songwriter Cole Porter wrote the words as well as the music for his film scores and Broadway musicals; his poignantly romantic “So in Love” was written for the two estranged lovers in Kiss Me Kate, an enduring Broadway favorite based on Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of the Shrew.

The first saxophonist to win First Prize at the Young Concert Artists Auditions as well as the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, the multi-talented Steven Banks is both a composer and a virtuoso performer striving to bring his instrument—long associated with jazz—into the heart of classical music. In 2022, he premiered his own Cries, Sighs and Dreams, a work for alto saxophone and string quartet, with the Borromeo Quartet at Carnegie Hall. Banks also has devoted himself to playing works originally written for other instruments, and his wonderfully eclectic Cal Performances program Golden Silhouettes will tackle works created for bassoon, voice, and cello. The highlight of this program, however, is Carlos Simon’s hear them, a work that is actually intended for the baritone saxophone and was written on a commission from Banks. It is a superb tone poem that showcases Banks’ dramatic instincts and the variegated tones of his instrument, from high, almost human cries, to the inky growling of its bass register. Simon, who has just been appointed as the Boston Symphony’s first-ever Composer-in-Residence and Boston Symphony Orchestra’s first-ever Composer Chair, writes, “I have been constantly aware of the presence of my ancestors in my life… This piece was inspired by a poem by Nayyirah Waheed, which simply asks the ancestors to speak louder if you cannot hear them.”

Written in 1921, the penultimate year of his long and prolific career, Camille Saint-Saëns’ suave French Bassoon Concerto is filled with beautiful singing lines as well as wit and virtuosity. Brooklyn-born composer John Musto’s Shadows of the Blues was originally a four-song cycle setting of poems by Langston Hughes about life in Harlem in the early 20th century. Here Musto, the son of a jazz guitarist, deftly mixes contemporary art-song style with haunting traces of the blues. We’ll also hear two works composed for the cello: Beethoven’s charming variations on “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen” and Samuel Barber’s Cello Sonata. The Beethoven is a cello showpiece based on the exquisite friendship duet “Bei Männern,” sung by Pamina and Papageno in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Barber wrote his Cello Sonata in 1932 when he was only in his early twenties. A passionate neo-Romantic work, both lyrical and dramatic, it bears a strong resemblance to the music of Brahms, a composer Barber particularly adored at that time.

The winner of First Prize at the 2021 International Chopin Competition, Chinese-Canadian pianist Bruce Liu is another young star making his Cal Performances debut this season. Liu began his piano studies at the age of eight, and made his debut with the Cleveland Orchestra just seven years later. Praised by the BBC Music Magazine for “playing of breathtaking beauty,” this Montreal native combines a refined, poetic tone with a capacity for fiery technical virtuosity when the music demands it. His first CD with Deutsche Grammophon featured his winning Chopin performances in Warsaw and was selected by Gramophone magazine for its list of the “Best Classical Albums of 2021.” Naturally, Chopin’s music will hold a prominent place in Liu’s Berkeley recital, including the two beautiful Nocturnes of Opus 27. Also featured will be three of the composer’s Impromptus in addition to the well-loved Fantasie Impromptu in C-sharp minor. This last work is included because it bears strong connections with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, also on the program, a work subtitled “Quasi una fantasia” (“almost a fantasy”) and is in the same key as the Chopin.

An unusual offering opens the program: Ligeti’s demanding “Fanfares” from his 1985 Etudes, Book 1. A work of coruscating brilliance and immense technical difficulty, “Fanfares” juxtaposes an angular fanfare motive with a continuous ostinato; the combination progressively creates intense polyrhythmic clashes between the two. Finally, Liu has chosen three sparkling Spanish-inspired pieces—Ravel’s humorous favorite Alborada del gracioso (“Morning Serenade of a Jester”), Albéniz’s “El Puerto” from his masterpiece Ibéria, and Liszt’s Rhapsodie espagnole. Since he was the only composer of the three who actually was Spanish, Albéniz’s colorful salute to the doorway of the Cathedral de Santa Maria in Cádiz is the most authentic in flavor, employing the traditional Spanish zapateado dance and reflecting the sound of the guitar. Naturally, Liszt’s rhapsody, based on two popular Iberian dance tunes, is the most spectacular—a suitably bravura recital finale.

In a season rich in great pianists, Alexandre Kantorow’s debut is a concert that no piano aficionado should miss. After his winning the First Prize, Gold Medal, and the rarely given Grand Prix at age 22 at the 16th International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2019, Kantorow’s career took off like a rocket. In 2023, he was given one of the most prestigious piano prizes, the Gilmore Artist Award, while in 2024 the French government made him a Chevalier del’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Also in 2024, he was a featured soloist at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. Gramophone magazine has described him as a “fire-breathing virtuoso with a poetic charm.”

Kantorow has chosen a remarkable program revealing the breadth of his musical skills. It begins with variations (Liszt’s meditative Variations on the Theme “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” after J.S. Bach) and closes with them (Beethoven’s sublime final Piano Sonata, Op. 111).  Two highlights of this concert will be sonatas by the early 20th century Russian virtuoso composers Nikolai Medtner and Alexander Scriabin. His music too rarely heard in America, Medtner was a brilliant composer who, upon graduating from the Moscow Conservatory at age 20, won the Gold Medal for piano (the head of the conservatory wishing it could be a Diamond Medal because of Medtner’s exceptional accomplishments!). Shortly thereafter, the composer created his formidable Piano Sonata in F minor, the first of what would be a total of 14 works in the form. A tremendous challenge for any pianist to tackle, this is a powerful late-Romantic work that sweeps the listener irresistibly along from beginning to end.

An eccentric, visionary composer, Scriabin claimed that “the purpose of music is revelation.” He dreamed of uniting nearly all of the senses in his works: hearing, sight, taste, and smell. Kantorow will play the last of his piano sonatas, No. 10, which is another major challenge—both technically and musically—for the pianist. With its abundance of glistening trills fluttering like tiny wings, this sonata is often called his “Insect Sonata,” based on a conversation with Scriabin in which he said, “Insects, butterflies, moths—they are all living flowers…. They are all born of the sun, and the sun nourishes them…. This sun-like caress is the closest to me. Take my tenth sonata—it is an entire sonata from insects.”