Summer Highlights

Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony will be a cornerstone of Rafael Payare’s performances with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (Montreal Symphony Orchestra/OSM) this summer, in Quebec and on tour. They perform three programs at Quebec’s Festival de Lanaudière in July and August, with the first program featuring the Shostakovich along with Beethoven’s Egmont Overture and Gabriela Ortiz’s recent Grammy-winning Dzonot cello concerto, with dedicatee Alisa Weilerstein as soloist (July 18). Another staple of the OSM’s repertoire, Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, which they released on a 2024 album on Pentatone, is the focus of the second Festival program. Complementing that work are Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse, heard in Bernardino Molinari’s 1923 symphonic arrangement made from the solo piano original, and Berlioz’s song cycle Les nuits d’été featuring mezzo-soprano Marie-Nicole Lemieux (July 31). The third and final Festival de Lanaudière program will feature pianist Bruce Liu. He performs both Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Third Piano Concerto – his last completed work – on a program that also includes two movements of Penderecki’s Sinfonietta No. 1 and Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite (Aug 1).

 Following those concerts, Payare leads the OSM on its 60th international tour, taking in major cities in Scotland, Poland, and Denmark before culminating at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie (Aug 19–28). Tour highlights include performances of both the Shostakovich and Strauss works; Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s monumental cantata trilogy, The Song of Hiawatha (Aug 19); a tribute to Canada’s Indigenous peoples by Canadian composers featuring works by Ana Sokolović and Ian Cusson (Aug 20); performances of Chopin’s two Piano Concertos by young pianists Kevin Chen (Aug 23) and Eric Lu (Aug 24); and Weilerstein’s reprising of her performance of Gabriela Ortiz’s Dzonot (Aug 20, 26 & 28).

For more information, visit the calendar.