Welcome to Celebrity Series: we're glad you're here.
Card to Culture—an initiative between Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA), Massachusetts Health Connector, and WIC Nutrition Program—offers accessible, low-cost arts and culture programming to low-income and working families across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
This season, EBT and WIC card holders can purchase $20 tickets for Celebrity Series concerts. Please take a look at the options below and see if there's a show that sparks your interest. We can't wait to see you at a performance!
Lakecia Benjamin, voted Rising Star Alto Saxophonist in the 2020 DownBeat Critics Poll and selected among 2020’s “25 for the Future” by the same publication, fuses traditional conceptions of jazz, hip hop, and soul to create electrifyingly danceable grooves.
Friday, December 1 at 8pm (Berklee Performance Center)
Renana Gutman, piano
Armenian violinist Diana Adamyan is quickly gaining an international reputation as one of her generation’s most outstanding violinists. After winning First Prize at the 2018 Yehudi Menuhin International Competition, the world’s most prestigious prize for young violinists, she went on to receive First Prize in the 2020 Khachaturian International Competition. Adamyan takes the Pickman Hall stage alongside Boston-based pianist Renana Gutman, a faculty member at Longy School of Music, for her Boston recital debut.
Thursday, December 7 at 7:30pm (Longy's Pickman Hall)
Acclaimed pianist and author Jeremy Denk curates a program that unites female composers across the centuries, telling a story of women’s genius, whether celebrated, neglected, remembered, or forgotten. He lends his insight, technical panache, and uniquely expressive style to this era-spanning program.
Saturday, December 9 at 8pm (NEC's Jordan Hall)
Music From The Sole is a tap dance and live music company that celebrates tap’s connections to Afro-Brazilian music and dance, and other influences across the African Diaspora. The company strives to bring tap dance and its lineage to the broadest possible audience. I Didn’t Come to Stay, a work for eight dancers and a five-piece band, earned a spot on the New York Times’ Best Dance Performances of 2022 list. It explores tap’s diasporic lineage and connections to house, samba, Brazilian funk, and jazz.
Evoking potent symbolism of the crow as a messenger between life and death, transcending space and time, Ashwini Ramaswamy explores memory, dislocation, ancestry, and more in Let the Crows Come.
“Super-cool, multi-talented and dauntlessly adventurous American countertenor” (The Telegraph) Anthony Roth Costanzo returns to Boston for an all-new recital program with pianist Bryan Wagorn.
A recent Grammy Award winner for his fearless and stunning portrayal of the title character in Philip Glass’ Akhnaten, Anthony Roth Costanzo has drawn public and critical acclaim for his unforgettable performances and the brilliance, power, and agility of his voice.
Costanzo’s recital, a new program for the upcoming season, promises dramatic commitment and incisive characterizations; “very few singers can bring such high-caliber acting to a concert appearance,” wrote Opera News.
French pianist Hélène Grimaud enjoys a busy and varied career on the world’s concert stages as an orchestral soloist, a chamber music partner, and a solo recitalist. Her combination of sheer strength and power tempered by her interpretive subtlety and technical control makes her an impressive pianist in any setting.
Grimaud’s Boston-area recital debut shows off her expressive skills and technical control: the many moods and the brilliant variations heard in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 30, the colors and soulfulness of Brahms’ late piano works, the pyrotechnics of Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s Chaconne.
Max Roach Centennial Celebration
Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra pay tribute to one of the greats when they celebrate the centennial of drummer Max Roach. Roach, a pioneering legend and innovative master musician and bandleader, spanned a diverse range of styles and influenced generations to follow with his artistry and his commitment to activism.
Brilliant jazz vocalist, composer, and lyricist Cécile McLorin Salvant weaves a tale of women’s secrecy under the male gaze in her latest project, Mélusine. Salvant takes as her inspiration the European folk legend of Mélusine, the woman cursed to spend one day each week as a half-snake. Experience the profound vision of a major talent with this fascinating song cycle from one of today’s most acclaimed singers in any genre.
Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings
Rob Kapilow, with the assistance of Boston’s self-conducted chamber orchestra A Far Cry, explores Tchaikovsky’s sweeping Serenade for Strings in the context of Tchaikovsky’s life and career. He unpacks and illustrates some of Tchaikovsky’s compositional choices and provides illuminating biographical and historical context about the composer, and how he negotiated the various political and artistic movements of his time.
Goldberg Variations
Drawing out the underlying structures and illuminating extraordinary moments, Víkingur Ólafsson reflects and refracts well-known works to make us hear them in new ways. With its rigorous form and opportunities for flights of virtuosic expression, what will this suite become in the hands of one of Bach’s most innovative and thoughtful interpreters? Let’s find out together.
The Takács Quartet are renowned around the world for their elegant, incisive accounts of the classic quartet repertoire and for their appetite for new music. Their program for this engagement offers two notable nineteenth-century string quartets alongside flow, a new work and Celebrity Series co-commission from violist and composer Nokuthula Ngwenyama.
Howard Watkins, piano
Praised in Opera News as “a gentle actor and elegant musician” and in The Wall Street Journal for his “mellifluous baritone,” vocalist Justin Austin is quickly making a name for himself on opera, oratorio, musical theatre, and concert stages around the United States and Europe. Austin’s beautifully “burnished” (The New York Times) baritone voice and compelling stage presence make this recital a can’t-miss Boston debut from a young artist who is rapidly scaling the heights of the operatic world.
To experience Time For Three (TF3) live is to hear the various eras, styles, and traditions of Western music – Americana, pop, classical, and more – fold in on themselves and emerge anew. Time For Three—Charles Yang (violin, vocals), Nicolas “Nick” Kendall (violin, vocals), and Ranaan Meyer (double bass, vocals)—have found a unique and captivating niche.
The Sydney Morning Herald praised their “brilliant classical technique, stylistic eclecticism, improvisatory flair, and imaginative wildness to produce performances of energy, humour, and fun.” Whether they’re performing contemporary music, jazz, classical, or pop covers, Time For Three will dazzle you!
Two generations of brilliant Cuban musicians come together when Arturo Sandoval and Pedrito Martinez share a double bill at Berklee Performance Center! Trumpeter Arturo Sandoval is an undisputed legend: a protégé of Dizzy Gillespie, who helped him defect from Cuba, he helped redefine the sound of Cuban jazz as a founding member of Irakere. Percussionist Pedrito Martinez, born in Havana, grew up surrounded by rumba music, and became a specialist in rumba and Afro-Cuban percussion, bringing his folkloric music to partnerships with musicians from around the world.
Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter and brilliantly talented multi-instrumentalist Sierra Hull returns with her band for an evening of virtuosity, honesty, and heart. She creates music inspired and informed by bluegrass but with a soundscape and point of view all her own. Folk, pop, and bluegrass come together with Hull’s heartfelt and clever lyrics and often-ethereal vocals for an unforgettable evening of music.
English saxophonist Jess Gillam is delighting the music world with her outstanding talent and irresistible personality. Gillam’s program will show off her range and versatility. Recent recital programs have spanned the Renaissance and Baroque, through the twentieth century, to the present day. Passionate about inspiring and bringing joy to people through music, Gillam invites audiences around the world on journeys of musical discovery through her electrifying performances and eclectic programming.
Scottish-American polymath Alan Cumming returns with his new cabaret show Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age, an evening of story and song celebrating and exploring his puckish, eclectic spirit and joie de vivre, with a joyful and mischievous exploration of that most communal of pastimes: aging!
Grammy-nominated composer and conductor Miho Hazama is one of the most promising and talented composers/arrangers of her generation. Lauded in DownBeat as one of “25 for the Future,” Hazama creates inventive, complex, and surprising compositions for m_unit, the 13-piece jazz chamber orchestra that she leads.
Klaus Mäkelä, conductor Yunchan Lim, piano soloist
Two young superstars lead the way when the Orchestre de Paris makes a return to Celebrity Series for the first time since 1993/94 with three important pieces that all premiered in the City of Light. Conductor Klaus Mäkelä, just twenty-eight, already has a major career, with prestigious appointments at Paris, Oslo, and the Concertgebouw. Yunchan Lim, who in 2022 became the youngest pianist to win the Cliburn Competition, takes the soloist part for Prokofiev’s breathtaking, fiendishly difficult Second Piano Concerto.
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