Familiar Favorites: The World-Renowned Artists Who’ve Made Berkeley a Second Home

By El Zager, Cal Performances’ Social Media, Digital Content and Engagement Specialist

Every season, Cal Performances curates a lineup of approximately 80 performances spanning an incredible range of genres, styles, and cultural traditions. And while no season looks identical to another, there are some world-renowned artists who have chosen to make Berkeley a second home. These iconic performers and creators serve as pillars of our programming, returning to us every year or few years—sometimes, over the course of decades!—and deepening their connection to Berkeley audiences with each new season. Though familiar favorites, their performances offer us fresh perspective each time, whether it’s via a different piece, a new collaborator, or simply a beloved classic that somehow hits differently the second time around.

If you’ve ever looked at our season calendar and felt that flicker of ‘“Where do I even begin?”—start here. These tried and true artists are favorites among Cal Performances audiences for a multitude of reasons—all of which are immediately clear upon your first encounter.

The below list represents a sampling of these artists, all of whom are featured this year on our 2026–27 season. Don’t miss the opportunity to experience these in-demand creators in a place so embedded in their own history—and consider this your very own Cal Performances rite of passage!

MAR 2–4, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL

Some ensembles don’t need an introduction so much as a moment of reverence. The Vienna Philharmonic is 185 years old, which means its history isn’t adjacent to that of Western classical music—it is that history, celebrating and preserving foundational traditions throughout the decades.Since the orchestra’s debut at Cal Performances in 2011 (which was its first performance in the region since 1987), the storied orchestra has performed more often in Berkeley than anywhere else in Northern California. During that time, Bay Area audiences have experienced the true range of the Vienna Philharmonic’s artistic powers under a number of legendary conductors, including the illustrious Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who most recently visited with the orchestra during their 2025 residency. This season, they return for three distinct programs across three nights, each of which centers on a different symphony by Gustav Mahler. For this very special visit, they bring with them a selection of internationally acclaimed guest artists, including pianist Yuja Wang, soprano Christiane Karg, mezzo-soprano Elina Garanča, and the Bay Area’s very own San Francisco Symphony Chorus led by director Jenny Wong. If you only let yourself have one bucket-list night this season, the case for spending it here is not a hard one to make.

APR 6–11, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL

Alvin Ailey didn’t just found a dance company in 1958—in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, he built something closer to an archive with a pulse, a “library of dance” designed to keep the work of dozens of choreographers alive long after they might otherwise have been lost. That instinct still defines the company today, more than 300 works and 100 choreographers deep. The Ailey company has visited Cal Performances annually for over 50 years, and in that time has performed more often in Berkeley than anywhere outside their home base in New York. They return each season for “Ailey Week,” bringing with them beloved favorites as well as a regular slate of new work by a range of influential choreographers that explore the Black American experience. Whether it’s a canonical piece like Revelations or a brand-new commission, an Ailey performance has always been, and remains, an event rather than an evening.

JAN 29, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL

Among the most venerated pianists and musical thinkers of our time, Mitsuko Uchida is acclaimed as a peerless interpreter of composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. Though her debut at Cal Performances dates back to 2014, Uchida has been a regular fixture of Cal Performances seasons since 2022, even serving as the organization’s artist in residence for the full 2023–24 season. Whether directing a concert or performing as soloist, Uchida offers Cal Performances audiences unmatched sensitivity and deep musical insight. This season, she returns to Berkeley in a solo recital of masterworks by composers with whom she has been closely associated throughout her career. There’s perhaps no purer representation of her powers than this stripped down recital— just Uchida, her piano, and the classical music canon brought to life on the Zellerbach Hall stage.

MAY 7–9, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL

Moses Pendleton, a Pilobolus co-founder, started Momix more than 40 years ago with a simple, strange ambition: erase the line between the human body and the natural world. Watch long enough and you’ll stop being able to tell where the dancer ends and the illusion begins—a body becomes a flower, a wasp, a gust of wind, utilizing nothing but light, costume, and astonishing physical control. A frequent Cal Performances collaborator, last season’s Alice (inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) sent audiences out of Zellerbach both dazed and delighted. This spring, the company returns with Botanica, a passage through all four seasons set to a score that drifts from birdsong to Vivaldi.

OCT 11, 2026, ZELLERBACH HALL

There’s a particular kind of trust that builds between an audience and a quartet over decades, and Berkeley has that with the Takács—a Grammy-winning ensemble whose performances still carry the electricity of a group discovering the music fresh, every single time, no matter how many times they’ve played it. This season they’re joined by pianist and MacArthur “Genius” Jeremy Denk, already a favorite in his own right, for César Franck’s searing Piano Quintet, paired with Mendelssohn and a work by Berkeley’s own Gabriela Lena Frank, fresh off a Pulitzer. Past collaborations between the Takács and Denk have been some of Cal Performances’ earliest sellouts of the season, so don’t miss your opportunity to see the magic live!

MAR 14, 2027, HERTZ HALL

Talk about one of our favorite power couples: cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han have been playing together since 1982, and their history with our stages runs even deeper than that: Finckel’s first encounter with cello legend Mstislav Rostropovich happened in a masterclass at Hertz Hall in the mid-1970s, and if you know where to look backstage, there’s still a small montage of photos from that class on the wall. As founders of Music@Menlo and co-directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, they carry real authority into every phrase, and their annual returns to Berkeley have become one of the season’s quieter, more devoted pleasures. The all-Russian program they bring to Hertz this spring features Rachmaninoff’s rhapsodic Cello Sonata along with Prokofiev’s mercurial Cello Sonata and Myaskovsky’s Second Cello Sonata.

APR 23, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL

Part of what makes viol master, conductor, and venerated scholar Jordi Savall so magnetic is that you genuinely never know what corner of history he’s about to excavate—his programs have a way of resurrecting anonymous and under-recognized composers, and revealing the threads that connect cultures across centuries. So it’s a small shock, and a delight, that this time he’s turning to something far more familiar: Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos. 3 and 5, performed on period instruments with his ensemble Le Concert des Nations. This concert is part of a lifelong project—and a lifelong dream—to record and perform Beethoven’s complete symphonic cycle, and, after decades of annual visits, it marks the first time Berkeley will hear his interpretation of these works with a full symphony orchestra.

APR 16, 2027, FIRST CHURCH, BERKELEY

More than 50 years ago, a group of Oxford undergraduates got together to sing Renaissance polyphony for the pure pleasure of it. That group, led by Peter Phillips, became The Tallis Scholars, and, in the decades since, they’ve become a defining voice of the early-music revival—a sound so pure and so precisely blended that it can feel like listening to architecture. This season’s annual visit features a program entitled Slings and Arrows…, which centers on Josquin des Prez’s Missa Fortuna desperata, one of the true monuments of Renaissance sacred music, alongside works by Jean Mouton and Walter Lambe. Sit in First Church and let five centuries come alive in one evening.

FEB 10, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL

The New Yorker once called her perhaps the most potent female singer of her generation, and anyone who has heard Joyce DiDonato live tends not to argue. Throughout the years, the mezzo-soprano has visited with a wide variety of passion projects, from a semi-staged concert dedicated to the environment featuring a local children’s choir, to last season’s breathtaking performance that set the poetry of Emily Dickinson to music alongside collaborators Time for Three. This season, she returns  with the period-music ensemble and choir Il Pomo d’Oro and an impressive cohort of vocalists for an evening built on tragedy: Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas paired with Carissimi’s Jephte. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear her take on Dido’s famous lament, “When I Am Laid on Earth.”

APR 25, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL

There’s a reason we keep bringing Harry Bicket and The English Concert back for Handel: nobody does it with quite the same clarity, wit, and dramatic instinct. Considered some of the foremost Handel interpreters in the world, this incredible pairing of conductor, period-instrument ensemble, and soloists has enriched Berkeley audiences with performances of Rodelinda, Giulio Cesare, and Hercules over the past decades. This season, they turn to Alessandro, and if you’ve caught any of their previous visits, you already know to clear your evening.

NOV 12–15, 2026, HENRY J. KAISER CENTER FOR THE ARTS, OAKLAND

Since William Kentridge’s first visit to Cal Performances for  the US premiere of his SIBYL in 2023, the South African artist has displayed the vast range of his artistry, with productions that evoke dance, projection, speech, song, shadow play, costume, and music to interrogate history. During the 2022–23 season, Kentridge served as artist in residence for the entire UC Berkeley campus, which celebrated his art across theater/opera, film, and drawing/animation. He returned in 2025 for the Bay Area premiere of incredibly memorable performances of The Great Yes, The Great No, and this year, Cal Performances audiences have the distinct pleasure of experiencing his magnum opus: The Head & the Load. An epic multidisciplinary work of theater, the production resurrects the largely untold story of more than two million Africans who labored, fought, and died during the First World War. Built for a massive stage, the performance will be hosted at Oakland’s Henry J. Kaiser Center Arena, and will serve as the first project in a new Cal Performances initiative that will see a Kentridge multidisciplinary work on each of the organization’s next five seasons. This work is of particular importance to Kentridge, and no doubt will be to our Bay Area audiences, too!

JAN 22–24, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL

For 45 years, the drummers of Kodo have turned taiko into something that feels less like a concert and more like a force of nature—across more than 7,500 performances in 50 countries. Performing in Zellerbach Hall roughly every two years, the athletic performers offer an expansive, all-consuming combination of sound and movement, rooted in a philosophy as simple as it is demanding: “play the drums with the simple heart of a child.” This season’s production, Luminance, marks the ensemble’s 45th anniversary and pays tribute to composer Maki Ishii’s groundbreaking Monochrome, alongside new works born from everywhere Kodo’s travels have taken them.

FEB 27–28, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL

The Trocks were founded in New York City in 1974, in the years just after the Stonewall Uprising, and their first shows happened on the makeshift stage of a downtown loft belonging to the West Side Discussion Group, an early gay and lesbian political organization. More than 50 years later, the original premise hasn’t budged: a company of professional male dancers performing the classical and modern repertoire en travesti and en pointe, each under an elaborately invented ballerina persona. The joke lands only because the dancing is seriously, technically excellent—the comedy comes from exaggerating the foibles, near-misses, and incongruities that serious ballet works very hard to hide. Treasured by Cal Performances audiences for decades, the Trocks last visited Berkeley in January 2024 to celebrate their 50th anniversary season, and this February they return with a repertory program of lovingly satirical takes on the works ballets aficionados know by heart. As the company itself puts it, “Comedy is serious business and ballet even more so.”

This list barely scratches the surface—there’s so much more across our 2026–27 season, including plenty of artists making their very first visit to Berkeley. But if you’re looking for a place to start, there is perhaps no greater endorsement of an artist than a community eager to have them back, again and again. Whether this is your first time at Cal Performances (or a live performance in general!) or you, too, are a frequent visitor to our halls, we hope to see you for any performances that spark your interest during the exciting season that lies ahead!

Explore the six guides to the season below to find the performances that were made for you.