On tour
Every date the ticketer lists, worldwide · venue time
TicketsMusic · USBoston Symphony OrchestraBoston Symphony Hall · BostonTicketsMusic · USBoston Symphony OrchestraBoston Symphony Hall · BostonTicketsMusic · USBoston Symphony OrchestraBoston Symphony Hall · BostonTicketsMusic · USBoston Symphony OrchestraStern Auditorium / Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall · New YorkTicketsThe profile · researched 10 October 2026
Boston Symphony at 145: a farewell season, a settled strike and a search with no obvious ending
The Boston Symphony Orchestra enters its 146th subscription season with Andris Nelsons conducting his last programmes as music director, a three-year labour deal signed days before opening night, and no successor named. Everything it plays between now and August 2027 is being heard as part of a transition.
Higginson's experiment, and the hall that made it
The orchestra was founded in 1881 by Henry Lee Higginson, a Boston financier who wanted a permanent, properly paid ensemble rather than a pick-up band assembled for the season. The first concert was given on 22 October 1881, with music by Beethoven, Haydn, Gluck, Schubert and Weber. Four years later Higginson added a lighter-repertoire offshoot, the Boston Pops, drawn largely from the same players — a dual structure the institution still runs.
Symphony Hall opened in 1900 and remains the fixed point of the whole operation. Designed by McKim, Mead and White, it was built to an early application of architectural acoustics, and critics writing about the orchestra still spend as much time on the room as on the conducting; it is routinely grouped with Amsterdam's Concertgebouw and the Vienna Musikverein as among the best-sounding halls anywhere.
Seventeen music directors have held the post. Serge Koussevitzky, from 1924 to 1949, commissioned heavily and established the orchestra's summer residence in the Berkshires, founding the training school there that became the Tanglewood Music Center. Seiji Ozawa's tenure ran from 1973 to 2002, the longest in the orchestra's history. The BSO has been counted among the American "Big Five" for most of the post-war period, and it carries one of the largest endowments in the field.
The Shostakovich decade
Andris Nelsons made his BSO debut at Carnegie Hall in March 2011, was named music director in May 2013 and took up the job for the 2014-15 season. The defining artistic project of that tenure began almost immediately: a Deutsche Grammophon survey of Shostakovich that started in 2015 with the Tenth Symphony and the Passacaglia from Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, issued as Under Stalin's Shadow. It won Best Orchestral Performance at the 58th Grammy Awards.
The cycle ran for roughly a decade and grew well past the symphonies, taking in the concertos and a full recording of Lady Macbeth, and collected five Grammys along the way — the coupling of Symphonies Nos. 4 and 11 took both Best Orchestral Performance and Best Engineered Album, Classical. The complete project was gathered into a 19-disc box set released in May 2025. The orchestra's recordings of Lady Macbeth and the Shostakovich piano concertos with Yuja Wang featured among the 2026 Grammy nominations.
Of the orchestra's thirteen Grammy Awards in total, six were won during Nelsons's thirteen years. That record is the awkward backdrop to what happened next.
The split, and the strike that nearly followed
Nelsons had been given a rolling, open-ended contract in January 2024. In early February 2026 the board voted not to renew it. The decision was made public on 6 March 2026, a fortnight after an all-Brahms programme on 21 February. The orchestra's explanation was that the two sides "were not aligned on future vision"; Nelsons said publicly that he understood the decision was "not related to artistic standards, performances, or achievements during my tenure". His contract runs to the close of the 2027 Tanglewood season.
The players had not been consulted, and the fallout landed in the middle of labour negotiations. On 22 August 2026 the musicians' union voted to authorise a walkout — which would have been the first in the orchestra's 145 years. With talks stalled, a 48-hour extension was announced on 23 August. On 25 August the players ratified a three-year contract by a 94 per cent vote, running through August 2029.
The settlement did more than fix pay. It wrote the musicians into artistic decision-making: choice of collaborators, repertoire planning, and a formal role in picking the next music director. Todd Seeber, chair of the BSO Players Committee, called it "an innovative and transformative path forward for American orchestras, involving players as never before". A group of patrons has continued to press for Nelsons's reinstatement and for more disclosure from chief executive Chad Smith, who arrived from the Los Angeles Philharmonic on 18 September 2023.
Money, maintenance and empty seats
The institutional strain behind the split is not only artistic. The endowment stood at roughly $600 million in 2025, but the organisation has been posting annual deficits, and an outside consultant's report put deferred maintenance on its buildings at $145 million. The structural problem is sector-wide: American orchestras now take under 35 per cent of revenue from ticket sales, against about 70 per cent in the 1970s.
Attendance has been uneven rather than uniformly poor. A Beethoven cycle sold out; a three-week "Voices of Loss" festival was described by one long-serving player as the worst-selling stretch in memory, with core classical weeks sometimes playing to houses close to half full. The Pops side has had better luck finding new audiences — a Day of the Dead concert drew around 2,400 Latino families. Reconciling the hall's running costs with that pattern is the job the next music director inherits.
That appointment is not imminent. The search committee seats four board members, two staff and five players in advisory roles. Nelsons leaves in August 2027, which leaves the 2027-28 season without a permanent chief; an interim appointment is the likely stopgap, with a permanent name realistically arriving for 2028-29. Conductors who have worked with the orchestra recently and are discussed in that context include Susanna Mälkki, Jakub Hrůša, Karina Canellakis, Elim Chan, Joana Mallwitz, Lahav Shani, Dalia Stasevska, Nathalie Stutzmann and Tugan Sokhiev. Board chair Barbara Hostetter, in post since 2021, has said the next director must have no other principal commitment.
The 146th season
The farewell season is built as a summing-up. It opened with a non-subscription gala on 17 September 2026 — Yo-Yo Ma playing the Elgar Cello Concerto, framed by Arturs Maskats's Tango and Brahms's Fourth Symphony — with the subscription series beginning the following night and running to 9 May 2027. There are 25 subscription programmes; Nelsons conducts 15 of them. The season is organised around four strands: Technology & Our Humanity, Creation, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky.
January brings all six numbered Tchaikovsky symphonies in a single month, followed by concert performances of The Queen of Spades. February gives the three Diaghilev ballet scores — The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring — across two consecutive weeks. Nelsons also leads composer-focused weeks on Mahler, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Strauss and Beethoven.
New work continues: three world premieres and two American premieres, including a Prologue by Sofia Gubaidulina and Alissa Firsova in September, Tod Machover's already and not yet in October, Francisco Coll's Piano Concerto in its American premiere the same month, and a Golijov Creation in November, paired with Haydn's oratorio on 5-7 November. The cellist Alisa Weilerstein is artist in residence. Guest conductors include Kent Nagano, Philippe Jordan, Paavo Järvi, Kazuki Yamada, Dennis Russell Davies and several of the names circling the vacancy. The orchestra takes a four-city European tour over ten days in March 2027 with Lang Lang, and plays two Carnegie Hall programmes in April — all-Prokofiev with the violinist Himari on 13 April, and Strauss's An Alpine Symphony with Yo-Yo Ma on 14 April.
What the critics are hearing
The reviews so far have been pointed rather than ceremonial. Lloyd Schwartz, writing for The Arts Fuse on opening night, called the programming odd and the Brahms Fourth "almost intolerable", objecting to a "galumphing and elephantine" tempo and to lower registers swamping the melodic lines; he found Ma "extraordinary" in the Elgar, played on Jacqueline du Pré's Stradivarius, and noted that Ma brought the cello section up to join him for a Casals arrangement as an encore. Nelsons was given a standing ovation before a note was played.
The 9 October programme drew a steadier verdict from Boston Classical Review: Coll's twenty-minute, three-movement concerto, co-commissioned by the BSO and first heard in Munich in March, came off as "smart, quirky and engaging", with Kirill Gerstein handling its near-continuous writing with a light touch and the orchestra playing with "nuanced assurance". The Beethoven Seventh that followed was more mixed — exuberant in the Scherzo, over-insistent in the finale, and marked by an unusual number of dropped notes in the winds and brass.
The pattern across the autumn is of an orchestra playing well under a conductor whose remaining weeks are being read as valedictory, in front of an audience that knows it. Critics have been explicit that the dispute hangs over the season without cancelling what is in the diary.
The show, now
A Symphony Hall subscription week is a repeat-performance format rather than a one-off: the same programme is typically given on Thursday at 8pm, Friday at 1.30pm and Saturday at 8pm, so the midweek evening audience and the Friday matinee audience hear identical repertoire. The shape is conventional and unhurried — an overture, a concerto or new work with the guest soloist, an interval, then a symphony after the break, running to roughly two hours including the interval. The 9 October 2026 programme is representative: Beethoven's Coriolan Overture, the American premiere of Francisco Coll's twenty-minute Piano Concerto with Kirill Gerstein, and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, with Gerstein adding Coll's Little Viennese Waltz as an encore. There are no support acts and no staging beyond the orchestra on the platform; where the music is sung or narrated, soloists such as the bass-baritone Davóne Tines or the kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor are placed at the front. Encores are not guaranteed and tend to come from the soloist — at the 17 September gala, Yo-Yo Ma invited the BSO cello section to join him for a Casals arrangement after the Elgar. Reviews this autumn have praised the ensemble's balance, colour and rhythmic grip while flagging unevenness in the wind and brass and some heavy-handed tempi from Nelsons, and critics have noted that audiences are applauding him at length before he raises the baton, which is read as a response to his forced departure rather than to the programme.
Researched from boston.com · bostonmagazine.com · wbur.org · bso.org · bostonclassicalreview.com · bostonclassicalreview.com · artsfuse.org · wbur.org
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
NBC Radio · Public domain
UpstateNYer · CC BY-SA 3.0
TashTish at English Wikipedia · CC BY 3.0
