The Frick Collection Announces 2026–27 Concert Season

New York (August 18, 2026) — The Frick Collection today announced its 2026–27 concert season, the second annual season in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium since the museum’s April 2025 reopening. Building on the extraordinary response to its inaugural year, the series continues to establish the Frick as one of New York’s most distinctive stages for chamber music, vocal recital, and early music, deepening the dialogue between live performance and the museum’s permanent collection and special exhibitions.

This season also broadens access to the series through phased ticketing sales, the continuation of lunchtime concerts, and a pair of free pop-up concerts in the Garden Court, giving a wider range of visitors the opportunity to experience music at the Frick.

“Our first season after the museum’s reopening reinforced just how much appetite there is for live music at the Frick,” stated Jeremy Ney, Head of Music and Performance. “This season, we are pleased to answer that call with a wide-ranging slate of musical explorations and collaborations, offering ever more ways for audiences to connect with music, art, and history. The 2026–27 season invites some of the world’s preeminent artists to perform in the Frick’s intimate, acoustically superb Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, whether for the first time or in long-awaited returns.”

The season opens on Sunday, October 18, with Goya’s Musical World, in which violinist and musical curator Francisco Fullana, joined by the Dolphins Quartet, Viano Quartet, and guitarist Rafael Aguirre, imagines the music that animated artist Francisco de Goya’s world—from the courtly refinement of Boccherini to the folk songs of working-class Madrid, culminating in a striking contemporary work by Spanish composer Mauricio Sotelo. Other ensembles include early-music group Ruckus, reflecting on the sounds of the early American republic with New England hymn repertoire; the Frick debut of the Isidore String Quartet, with star pianist Conrad Tao; and an exploration of Bach’s musical influences led by cellist Jay Campbell, violinist Geneva Lewis, and keyboardist Jonathan Cohen.

Renowned vocalist and leader of Opera Philadelphia Anthony Roth Costanzo, who performed in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium’s inaugural concert, returns in November with a special recital previewing his project Countertenor—a forthcoming book and companion album illuminating the history of the high male voice—ranging from Baroque laments to traditional Hawaiian song, the New Wave avant-garde of Klaus Nomi, and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. A highlight in the spring is a pair of concerts featuring composer Matthew Aucoin as both creator and curator: One evening spotlights four UK–based contemporary composers, while the other marks the world premiere of a new work by Aucoin commissioned by the Frick, written for and performed by cellist Coleman Itzkoff alongside the composer. Students from London’s Royal Academy of Music will take part in Aucoin’s curated programs and present a weekday lunchtime concert—continuing the series that launched last season along with three performances by period-instrument ensemble Juilliard415.

The Frick’s fall exhibition Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500 is the inspiration for two weekends of programming in November:  Early-music specialists Jasper Snow, Georgia Burashko, Joshua Cheatham, and Richard Pittsinger bring to life surviving fragments of Sienese polyphony, while the Antwerp-based ensemble Graindelavoix performs a program centered on the ceremonial motet Sena vetus, composed in honor of the Tuscan city. This season also introduces a new, informal way for visitors to connect with music: pop-up performances in the Frick’s iconic Garden Court, offered free with museum admission. The inaugural Garden Court concerts, on the afternoons of November 14 and 22 (ahead of Sunday evening performances in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium), will bring the rarely heard sounds of fifteenth-century Siena drifting into the garden’s surrounding galleries as an experiential extension of the exhibition itself.

Two esteemed early-music ensembles will make their Frick debuts in spring 2027, also lending musical color to art history with inspiration from Painting with Fire: Susanne de Court and the Art of Enamel, the first exhibition dedicated to the only known woman enamel artist of the French Renaissance. Twelfth Night, led by violinist Rachell Ellen Wong and harpsichordist David Belkovski, complements the mythic and sacred influences of De Court’s creations through works by Couperin and Bach. And New York’s flagship Baroque orchestra, the Helicon Ensemble, presents Handel’s dramatic cantata Apollo e Dafne with rising star soprano Song Hee Lee—a 2026 Grand Finals winner of the Metropolitan Opera’s prestigious Laffont Competition—and the Frick debut of acclaimed baritone Tyler Duncan.

Other recitals spotlight some of today’s leading soloists and artist-collaborators from around the world. Tunisian-Canadian mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb and pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz juxtapose two ways of hearing the Middle East and North Africa: as imagined by European composers via French art song, and as lived and sung by its own people through traditional songs as well as anthems of the Lebanese Civil War and the Tunisian revolution. Renowned English tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Julius Drake bring their decades of musical partnership to the songs of Robert Schumann, while two of France’s foremost chamber musicians, cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras and pianist Alexandre Tharaud, mark thirty years of playing together with repertoire from across their career. Another duo, Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, share a program—and a keyboard—for their Frick debut, with a mix of solo and four-hands repertoire for piano. Famed soloist Paul Lewis pairs Mozart piano sonatas with works by later composers across two evenings, while rising star pianists Federico Colli and nineteen-year-old Alexandra Dovgan make their Frick debuts.

 

Concert season tickets

Tickets for the 2026–27 concert season will be available for purchase in two phases at frick.org/concerts. Tickets for the 2026 concerts (October–December) will go on sale September 8, with a member presale beginning September 1. Tickets for the 2027 concerts (January–May) will go on sale December 15, with a member presale beginning December 8.

General tickets for evening concerts are $80, and lunchtime concerts are $35. Frick members receive 20% off tickets. All concert tickets include access to the museum up to two hours before the performance begins. Concerts in the Garden Court are free with museum admission and open to all visitors, with limited seating and standing room available on a first-come, first-served basis.

 

THE FRICK COLLECTION 2026–27 CONCERT SEASON SCHEDULE

 

Goya’s Musical World: Francisco Fullana, violin; Dolphins String Quartet;
Viano Quartet; Rafael Aguirre, guitar

Sunday, October 18, 5:00 p.m.

Violinist and musical curator Francisco Fullana opens the season with an inventive program that approaches artist Francisco de Goya not through painting but through sound, imagining the music that animated the painter’s world. Joined by the Dolphins Quartet, Viano Quartet, and guitarist Rafael Aguirre, Fullana explores Goya from three vantage points.

The courtly world of aristocratic patronage emerges in Boccherini’s Guitar Quintet, heard in an arrangement for full ensemble. The folk and popular traditions of Goya’s Spain—the tonadillas and zarzuelas of working-class Madrid—find a vivid parallel in one of the Frick’s Goya paintings, The Forge. The program culminates with Mauricio Sotelo’s striking contemporary work Red Inner Light Sculpture. Together, these perspectives evoke the vibrant musical life Goya cultivated in his own home, where the finest musicians of his day gathered for evenings of song and dance.

 

Lunchtime Concerts: Juilliard415 and Royal Academy of Music

Thursday, October 22, 1:00 p.m.

Thursday, December 17, 1:00 p.m.

Thursday, February 4, 1:00 p.m.

Thursday, March 4, 1:00 p.m.

The Frick continues its partnership with two of the world’s most celebrated conservatories—the Juilliard School and the Royal Academy of Music—with a series of weekday lunchtime concerts featuring student musicians from both institutions. Juilliard415, the school’s acclaimed period-instrument ensemble, performs three programs across the fall and winter. In the spring, musicians from London’s Royal Academy of Music offer one lunchtime performance and take part in the weekend of concerts curated by composer Matthew Aucoin.

 

American Harmony: Ruckus with Lily Hammond, treble; Linnea Sablosky, alto;
Tim Eriksen, tenor; John Taylor Ward, bass

Sunday, October 25, 5:00 p.m.

Rapidly becoming the Frick’s house band, the early-music ensemble Ruckus returns with American Harmony, drawn from one of the nation’s earliest repertoires: the New England hymn. In the founding decades of the republic, small Yankee towns built their own identity out of homegrown counterpoint—fervent settings of grief, mortality, and civic conscience by composers such as William Billings, Daniel Read, and their contemporaries. Featuring singers Lily Hammond, Linnea Sablosky, Tim Eriksen, and John Taylor Ward, Ruckus offers—in the year of the country’s 250th anniversary—a window into the music of a young nation.

 

Countertenor: Anthony Roth Costanzo & ensemble led by Dan Schlosberg

Sunday, November 1, 5:00 p.m.

Following his performances with Jupiter Ensemble to inaugurate the Frick’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium in April 2025, Anthony Roth Costanzo returns with a program tied to his latest project: Countertenor, a new book published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and a companion recording with Nonesuch Records. Both illuminate the countertenor voice as an instrument of reinvention—part oddity, part divinity.

Costanzo brings the album to the Frick stage with an ensemble led by Dan Schlosberg. Seventeenth-century Baroque laments by Monteverdi and Dowland give way to a Mozart duet, a Hawaiian song, and avant-gardist Klaus Nomi’s “You Don’t Own Me.” Costanzo also performs a 2024 work written for him by Osvaldo Golijov, concluding with a hypnotic aria from Philip Glass’s iconic Einstein on the Beach.

 

Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello; Alexandre Tharaud, piano

Sunday, November 8, 5:00 p.m.

Two of France’s foremost chamber musicians return to the Frick to mark thirty years of playing together, an anniversary they distill into a single, wide-ranging program drawn from the repertoire they have recorded across three decades. The performance ranges from the Baroque viol music of Marin Marais and Francis Poulenc’s reworked Renaissance dances to the modernism of Alban Berg, with the music of Johannes Brahms anchoring both halves of the program, including the duo’s own arrangements of three Hungarian Dances.

 

The Music of Siena: Jasper Snow, vielle; Georgia Burashko, alto;
Joshua Cheatham, viol; Richard Pittsinger, tenor

Saturday, November 14, 2:00 p.m. (Garden Court)

Sunday, November 15, 5:00 p.m.

Fifteenth-century Siena was no silent city—its churches and streets carried chants, bells, processions, and devotional song—yet little of its notated polyphony survives, and almost none can be tied to a local composer. Led from the vielle by Jasper Snow, this program gathers pieces preserved in or near Sienese sources, several recovered from reused parchment. Works by Antonio da Cividale, Johannes Ciconia, and Zacara da Teramo set these surviving fragments within the international sound-world of the early fifteenth century—where Italian and French styles met in music of restless rhythmic and contrapuntal invention—alongside anonymous love songs and devotional works for local saints.

These performances are presented in conjunction with the Frick’s special exhibition Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500. Like the exquisite bronzes on view in the show, this music poses a question of survival: while sculpture endures as matter, music endures only through copy, loss, and dispersal—traced here from manuscript back to living sound.

 

The Music of Siena: Graindelavoix

Sunday, November 22, 2:00 p.m. (Garden Court)

Sunday, November 22, 5:00 p.m.

The Antwerp-based ensemble Graindelavoix, led by Björn Schmelzer and celebrated for its visceral, ornament-rich approach to early music, closes the Music of Siena series with a program that listens to the city’s golden age through the voices that filled it. These performances are presented in conjunction with the Frick’s special exhibition Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500.

In the closing decades of the fifteenth century, the legendary Franco-Flemish polyphonists who traveled south across the Alps sang in Siena’s cathedral, their music as much a part of the city’s splendor as its bronzes. At the program’s heart is Sena vetus, the only known fifteenth-century ceremonial motet in honor of Siena—the “city of the life-giving Virgin”—composed by the Franco-Flemish Arnolfo Giliardi for a Sienese patron. Around this motet unfold laments, Marian hymns, and devotional songs by Du Fay, Ockeghem, Josquin, Isaac, and Agricola—music that, like the reliefs and statues it accompanies, gives form to grief, beauty, and the sacred.

 

Paul Lewis, solo piano

Saturday, December 5, 5:00 p.m.

Sunday, December 6, 5:00 p.m.

Over two evenings, the British pianist Paul Lewis—celebrated for the lucidity of his Beethoven and Schubert—brings his Mozart project to the Frick, pairing Mozart’s sonatas with works by later composers. The Saturday concert explores Mozart through a French lens, framing Poulenc’s mercurial Improvisations and Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse with the sonatas K. 330 and K. 457. Sunday’s concert delves into the piano’s cantabile singing voice: the sonatas K. 570 and the operatic K. 333 surround Schubert’s late Drei Klavierstücke, D. 946, and a Chopin polonaise and two nocturnes. Together the recitals show Mozart’s presence surfacing in the music that came after him.

 

Pavel Kolesnikov & Samson Tsoy, piano four-hands

Sunday, December 13, 5:00 p.m.

Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy have played as a duo since their student days, and their Frick debut finds them both together and alone, in a program that moves from intimacy to extremity. They share a single keyboard for Schubert’s Hungarian Divertissement and, to close, Beethoven’s four-hand arrangement of the Grosse Fuge. In between, each plays solo: Chopin nocturnes, Ustvolskaya’s explosive Sixth Sonata, and Beethoven’s late Piano Sonata in E Major, Op. 109.

 

Jay Campbell, cello; Geneva Lewis, violin; Jonathan Cohen, harpsichord

Sunday, January 24, 5:00 p.m.

In 1705, a twenty-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach traveled more than 250 miles on foot to study with composer and organist Dieterich Buxtehude. Avery Fisher Career Grant recipients Jay Campbell, cello (JACK Quartet), and Geneva Lewis, violin, join renowned keyboardist and conductor Jonathan Cohen for a program drawing on this monumental meeting, featuring works from both composers alongside other masters of the Baroque era.

 

Isidore String Quartet; Conrad Tao, piano

Sunday, January 31, 5:00 p.m.

The New York–based Isidore String Quartet makes its Frick debut with a program partly inspired by a teacher and his pupil. Frank Bridge’s Three Idylls (1906) sit beside the Three Divertimenti of Benjamin Britten, who studied with Bridge as a teenager and later built his Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge on the second of Bridge’s Idylls. Closing the first half is Mozart’s String Quartet No. 21 in D Major, K. 575, the first of the “Prussian” quartets, composed with Prussia’s cello-playing king in mind and giving that instrument rare prominence. After intermission, star pianist Conrad Tao joins the quartet for Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44, the work that established the piano quintet as a genre.

 

Rihab Chaieb, mezzo-soprano; Ammiel Bushakevitz, piano

Sunday, February 21, 5:00 p.m.

Mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb and pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz weave together two ways of hearing the Middle East and North Africa: as imagined by European composers, and as lived and sung by its own people. Alongside French art song that gazes outward—Ravel’s folk settings and the Persian and Arab evocations of Saint-Saëns, Bizet, and Aubert—they set songs from Osvaldo Golijov’s Mediterranean cycle Ayre, the Andalusian muwashshah titled Lamma Bada Yatathanna, Fairuz’s lament for Beirut, and a traditional Tunisian song from Chaieb’s own heritage. The program closes with Emel Mathlouthi’s Kelmti Horra, the anthem of the 2011 Tunisian revolution, followed by a set of traditional lullabies.

 

Matthew Aucoin: In Focus

Friday, March 5, 7:00 p.m.

Sunday, March 7, 5:00 p.m.

Over two evenings, composer Matthew Aucoin appears as both creator and curator. On Friday, he introduces four United Kingdom–based composers little heard in the United States—Lisa Illean, Mark Simpson, Tom Coult, and Fergus Hall. On Sunday, his own work takes center stage: his James Merrill Songs juxtaposed with Benjamin Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo with tenor Paul Appleby, followed by Britten’s Cello Suite No. 1, Op. 72. These are paired with the world premiere of a new work by Aucoin commissioned by the Frick, written for cellist Coleman Itzkoff and performed with the composer.

 

Alexandra Dovgan, solo piano

Sunday, March 14, 5:00 p.m.

Nineteen-year-old Russian-born pianist Alexandra Dovgan already draws rare admiration from luminaries of the keyboard. A prodigy admitted to Moscow’s Central Music School at five and now based in Spain, she has won over audiences across Europe’s major halls with playing of unusual poise, depth, and precision. Fresh from her acclaimed United States debut in 2026, she makes her Frick debut with a program of formidable scale: Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, framed by two Chopin nocturnes, Op. 27, and Rachmaninoff’s Sonata No. 2, Op. 36.

 

Ian Bostridge, tenor; Julius Drake, piano

Sunday, April 25, 5:00 p.m.

Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake, partners in song for some thirty years, devote an evening entirely to Robert Schumann. All three sets belong to 1840, the composer’s astonishing “year of song,” when he turned most of his creative energy to the form: the rarely heard Op. 40 settings of Hans Christian Andersen; the Eichendorff Liederkreis, Op. 39; and the Kerner Lieder, Op. 35, twelve settings of Justinus Kerner. Few duos have lived inside this music as deeply, and the program echoes Bostridge’s recent album devoted to Schumann’s cycles.

 

Twelfth Night, early-music ensemble

Sunday, May 2, 5:00 p.m.

The New York–based ensemble Twelfth Night makes its Frick debut with Approaching the Divine, a program inspired by the exhibition Painting with Fire: Susanne de Court and the Art of Enamel and by the Frick’s own De Court medallion depicting Apollo and the Muses making music. Built around François Couperin’s L’Apothéose de Corelli, which carries the composer up the mountain of the Muses to join the immortals, and set beside the music of J. S. Bach, the program traces the mythic and sacred routes to transcendence that animate De Court’s enamels.

 

Federico Colli, solo piano

Sunday, May 16, 5:00 p.m.

The Italian pianist Federico Colli, winner of the Salzburg Mozart Competition and the Leeds Gold Medal, brings a literary sensibility to the keyboard, praised by The Daily Telegraph for his “lyrical grace” and by Gramophone as one of the more original musical thinkers of his generation. A Chandos recording artist admired for his Scarlatti, Bach, and Mozart, Colli makes his Frick debut with a program setting a turbulent twentieth-century first half against two sunlit classical sonatas. Janácek’s elegiac Sonata 1.X.1905 and Prokofiev’s fleeting Visions fugitives give way to a pair of A-Major works: Schubert’s Sonata, D. 664, and Mozart’s K. 331, crowned by the latter’s celebrated Alla turca finale.

 

Helicon Ensemble; Song Hee Lee, soprano; Tyler Duncan, baritone

Sunday, May 23, 5:00 p.m.

The Helicon Ensemble makes its Frick debut. Led by harpsichordist Avi Stein and newly established as New York’s flagship permanent Baroque orchestra, it gathers principal players from the leading American period-instrument groups into a single standing body. For their Frick program, the ensemble presents Handel’s dramatic cantata Apollo e Dafne, the story of the god’s pursuit of the nymph who escapes him by turning into a laurel tree. Song Hee Lee, a 2026 Grand Finals winner of the Metropolitan Opera’s Laffont Competition, returns to the Frick as Daphne, with Tyler Duncan making his Frick debut as Apollo.

The program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Painting with Fire: Susanne de Court and the Art of Enamel, whose mythological subject matter of gods and metamorphoses animates Handel’s cantata.

 

SEASON support

The 2026–27 concert season is generously supported by the Howard & Sarah D. Solomon Foundation, Ayesha Bulchandani, Karen Z. Gray-Krehbiel and John H. Krehbiel Jr., and Ravenel Curry and Jane Moss. Additional funding is provided by Fernand Lamesch, Robert Ouimette, Alexa and Marc Suskin, Winifred A. Baker, Polly Carter Weissman, Neil Westreich, the Bott Murphy Charitable Trust, Thomas Giallorenzi in memory of Catherine M. Pittari, and an anonymous donor.

              The Frick Collection is grateful to the Howard & Sarah D. Solomon Foundation for sponsoring the Juilliard415 and Royal Academy of Music lunchtime concerts on October 22 and December 17, 2026, and February 4, 2027, and the Matthew Aucoin: In Focus concerts on March 5 and 7, 2027.

 

ABOUT CONCERTS AT THE FRICK COLLECTION

The Frick Collection’s acclaimed concert series is a beacon for extraordinary musical artistry, captivating audiences since 1938 with performances by world-class soloists, chamber groups, and pioneering early-music ensembles. The series is based in the museum’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, an intimate 211-seat hall opened in 2025 whose acoustics have garnered praise as one of the city’s best new venues for live music. 

Over the decades, the Frick has introduced New York audiences to  many of the past century’s greatest soloists and ensembles, among them the legendary instrumentalists Wanda Landowska, Gregor Piatigorsky, Artur Schnabel, and Joseph Szigeti; vocalists Kathleen Battle, Peter Pears, Elisabeth Söderström, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Anne Sofie von Otter; the Amadeus,  Budapest, Guarneri, and Tokyo quartets; and the New York debuts of notable international musicians including the Bennewitz Quartet, Ian Bostridge, the Carmina Quartet, Sarah Connolly, Mahan Esfahani, Gerald Finley, Fretwork, Matthias Goerne, Wolfgang Holzmair, Felicity Lott, Mark Padmore, Yevgeny Sudbin, the Jacques Thibaud String Trio, Pieter Wispelwey, and Thomas Zehetmair. The Frick is also renowned as a venue for groundbreaking performers of period instruments, such as Richard Egarr, Andrew Manze, Quatuor Mosaïques, and Jordi Savall with Hespèrion XXI.

For more information, please visit frick.org/concerts.

 

ABOUT THE FRICK COLLECTION

Housed in one of New York City’s last great Gilded Age homes, The Frick Collection provides intimate encounters with one of the world’s foremost collections of fine and decorative arts. Open since 1935, the institution originated with Henry Clay Frick, who bequeathed his Fifth Avenue residence and collection of European paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts for the enjoyment of the public. The museum’s holdings, which encompass masterworks from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century, have grown over the decades, more than doubling in number since the opening of the museum. The Frick Art Research Library, founded more than one hundred years ago by Henry Clay Frick’s daughter, Helen Clay Frick, is a leading art history research center that serves students, scholars, and the public.

For more information, please visit frick.org.

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