Orchestra Of St. Luke's Celebrates 50th Anniversary In 2024-25

Orchestra of St. Luke’s (OSL) will celebrate its 50th anniversary with an ambitious 2024-25 season featuring 13 performances at Carnegie Hall, including a series in each of Carnegie’s three halls, and innovative presentations of contemporary music and world premieres both at the orchestra’s home, The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, and with partners in all five boroughs. Performances in Carnegie’s Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage include conductor Louis Langrée making his Carnegie Halldebut with cellist Sterling Elliott as guest soloist (Nov 14); the New York debut of conductor Raphaël Pichon, who leads the U.S. premiere of his evening-length concert of Schubert and his contemporaries, Mein Traum (Jan 23); and two Carnegie mainstage programs that mark Bernard Labadie’s final season as OSL Principal Conductor, first featuring pianist Marc-André Hamelin in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto alongside works by Mozart and Haydn (Feb 13) and then Bach’s St. John Passion with Labadie’s own La Chapelle de Québec (April 10). The concerts in OSL’s Chamber Music Series, performed in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, comprise a program of Schubert, Fauré and Mozart with soprano Liv Redpath and pianist George Li (Oct 16); celebrated bandoneon player Julien Labro playing music by Piazzolla and others (Dec 11); a program of wind music by Barber, Mozart and Strauss, along with Beethoven’s B-flat Piano Trio, with special guest pianist Zhu Wang (March 5); and the New York premiere of Richard Danielpour and Rita Dove’s A Standing Witness featuring mezzo-soprano Susan Grahamand pianist Michael Boriskin (April 16). The annual OSL Bach Festival in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall juxtaposes the Baroque master with three other composers: Vivaldi (June 3), French Baroque violinist and composer Jean-Marie Leclair (June 10), and Mozart (June 17), with featured guest artists conductor Lionel Meunier, countertenor Reginald Mobley, soprano Gemma Nha, violinist/conductor Théotime Langlois de Swarte, and pianist/conductor Angela Hewitt. The fourth and final performance of the festival will feature OSL performing all six of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti (June 24).
 
Outside Carnegie Hall, the innovative new music “Visionary Sounds” series at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music includes a program curated and featuring multiple compositions by Augusta Read Thomas (April 30); a concert featuring signature works by Courtney Bryan and John Zorn (Feb 19); and the world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter III for baritone and chamber ensemble, along with selections from Freya Waley-Cohen’s Spell Book (Dec 4). The music of Chinese American composer Chen Yi is the focus of the annual NYC Five Borough Tour (March 23–29), and OSL celebrates the work of twelve other women composers in the 2024–25 season as well. OSL’s DeGaetano Composition Institute – led by Augusta Read Thomas and conductor Brad Lubman – continues with a concert of world premieres from a new group of emerging composers (July 29); the orchestra continues its tradition of offering free school concerts, with this season’s performances featuring the music of Kinan Azmeh; and OSL continues its longstanding collaboration with the Paul Taylor Dance Company (PTDC), performing live on every program during PTDC’s three-week Lincoln Center season (Nov 5–24).  
 
James Roe, OSL’s President and Executive Director, elaborates:

“Orchestra of St. Luke’s is New York ‘s hometown band – and its 50th anniversary is a New York story. Arising from the cultural hothouse of 1970s Greenwich Village, Orchestra of St. Luke’s grew in response to the musical and cultural needs of audiences, partners, students, and the broader community, redefining what an orchestra can be. That spirit animates us to this day. With three series in Carnegie Hall, innovative programming at The DiMenna Center, partnerships around the city, and a youth orchestra in Hell’s Kitchen, OSL brings the full possibilities of a 21st-century orchestra to New York City audiences.”  

OSL at Carnegie Hall

Orchestra of St. Luke’s opens its 50th Anniversary Season with the long-awaited Carnegie Hall debut of Louis Langrée. Having recently concluded a “transformative” (New York Times) decade as Music Director of the Cincinnati Symphony, Langrée is also beloved by New York City audiences for his artistic leadership as Music Director of the Mostly Mozart Festival from 2003 to 2023. This tenure was, as the New York Times declared, “by any measure a triumph of ensemble-building and musical curiosity,” capping a “quietly remarkable” career that has been “a steady climb of prestige and quality.” Langrée leads OSL in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, along with Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 2 in D with soloist Sterling Elliott, who performed as a member of OSL’s cello section as a Juilliard student. Opening the program is Fanfare for Uncommon Times by frequent OSL collaborator Valerie Coleman, which was commissioned by the orchestra in 2021 (Nov 14).

See Sterling Elliott share his thoughts on the upcoming performance 

In a recent profile of conductor Raphaël Pichon, the New York Times noted that “Pichon … in a short time has become not just one of the most interesting younger conductors working with period instruments, but also one of the most interesting conductors around.” Pichon’s original program, Mein Traum – released on the Harmonia Mundi label in 2022 and characterized as “evanescent, bewitching” in the New York Times – is based on an image Schubert wrote down in 1822: “With a heart full of infinite love for those who spurned that love, I wandered.” Anchoring the program with Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, Pichon chose narrative complements in the form of excerpts from the same composer’s stage works, as well as arias from Weber’s operas and Schumann’s Szenen aus Goethes Faust, weaving a vast Romantic tapestry around Schubert’s major themes. Soloists for OSL’s U.S. premiere performance – which also marks Pichon’s New York debut – are baritone Christian Gerhaher, who achieved a triumph last fall in the Metropolitan Opera’s Tannhäuser, and soprano Ying Fang, a frequent collaborator with Pichon, known for her “voice that can stop time, pure and rich and open and consummately expressive” (Financial Times) (Jan 23).

See Ying Fang expand on her experiences with OSL and Pichon

Bernard Labadie conducts two of the Carnegie mainstage programs in the upcoming season. First, he teams up with his longtime friend and collaborator Marc-André Hamelin for a performance of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto, along with Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 and the introduction to Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ (Feb 13). For Labadie’s final performance as Principal Conductor, he concludes his series of major Bach choral masterworks with the towering St. John Passion. Philippe Sly – known for his “beautiful, blooming tone and magnetic stage presence” (San Francisco Chronicle) – reprises the role of Jesus he performed in OSL’s St. Matthew Passion in 2022. Tenor Andrew Haji, praised by the Calgary Herald for “lyric beauty and carrying power,” sings the Evangelist. Soprano Joélle Harvey, who was featured in last season’s OSL Bach Festival, countertenor Hugh Cutting, tenor Samuel Boden, and baritone William Thomas complete the roster. The celebrated La Chapelle de Québec chorus, founded by Labadie in 1985 and directed by him ever since, joins OSL for the performance (April 10).

See Bernard Labadie discuss the upcoming performance of the St. John Passion

Labadie’s seven-year tenure with OSL has been the most significant of any OSL titled conductor. The fifth to step into that role, Labadie followed in the distinguished footsteps of Sir Roger Norrington (1990-1994), Sir Charles Mackerras (1998-2001), Sir Donald Runnicles (2001-2007) and Pablo Heras-Casado (2011-2017). He led a substantial OSL expansion at Carnegie Hall with the creation of the OSL Bach Festival in 2019, led a cycle of major Bach chorale masterpieces at Carnegie Hall including the St. Matthew Passion, Christmas Oratorio and the upcoming St. John Passion, conducted more concerts with OSL than any other Principal Conductor, and received consistently glowing praise in the press. Following the pandemic, New York audiences embraced Labadie’s programs, resulting in box office records. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Manhattan School of Music (MSM), conducted the MSM Orchestra and gave masterclasses at both MSM and the Juilliard School, and regularly worked with Youth Orchestra of St. Luke’s, New York’s only youth orchestra under the umbrella of a professional orchestra.
 
Justin Davidson, in New York magazine, called OSL “one of our perpetually underappreciated hometown groups,” noting after OSL’s 2022 St. Matthew Passion: “The result was a luminous rarity: a baroque behemoth performed by a big ensemble with delicacy, lightness, and paschal fervor. … Labadie, the orchestra’s [principal conductor] and a Bach specialist, managed that complex flow of beauty and rage with a mastery worthy of DeMille.” The New York Times agreed: “Under Labadie’s baton, the music was unwaveringly measured but balanced; its flashes of grandeur didn’t need to be overstated to land powerfully.”
 
With Labadie’s imminent departure, the search for OSL’s sixth Principal Conductor has begun, with the search committee comprising board, musicians, and staff.

OSL Bach Festival in association with Carnegie Hall (June 3–24)

In June 2024, OSL returns to Carnegie’s Zankel Hall to celebrate J. S. Bach’s musical legacy with its annual OSL Bach Festival. Lionel Meunier, founder and artistic director of the Belgian early music ensemble Vox Luminis, conducts the first program, “J.S. Bach’s Stabat Mater,” with soprano Gemma Nha and countertenor Reginald Mobley. The program centers on Bach’s arrangement of the music from Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, which uses a German paraphrase of Psalm 51 as the text. Also on the program are two vocal works by Vivaldi: the motet “Nulla in mundo pax sincera” and the psalm setting “Nisi dominus” (June 3).
 
The second program, “J.S. Bach and the French Baroque,” is led by French violinist and conductor Théotime Langlois de Swarte. Included on the program is the Concerto in A minor, Op. 7, No. 5 by Jean-Marie Leclair, which Langlois de Swarte included on a 2022 album of Baroque concertos that Gramophone raved was “excellence itself.” The review went on: “His playing is joyful; it is wild and beautiful, inventive and efficient. … These are performances so special that I feel a changed man from listening to them.” The Leclair concerto is juxtaposed with Bach’s concerto in the same key, BWV 1041, and more repertoire is to be announced (June 10).
 
The third of the four performances features pianist and conductor Angela Hewitt, who has been renowned as a Bach interpreter since her first prize win in the1985 Toronto International Bach Piano Competition, held in memory of Glenn Gould. Her award-winning cycle for Hyperion Records of all Bach’s major keyboard works has been described as “one of the record glories of our age” (The Sunday Times). The program comprises two of Bach’s keyboard concertos, in G minor and D minor, along with Mozart’s Concerto No. 17 in G and the same composer’s Quintet for Piano and Winds(June 17). OSL takes center stage for the final performance without a conductor, playing all six of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti (June 24).

“Visionary Sounds” at DiMenna Center

OSL celebrates 13 women creators during the 2024–25 season, six of them in the context of “Visionary Sounds,” an inter-disciplinary new music series at The DiMenna Center launched in 2022-23 that spotlights twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists. The first program comprises the world premiere of 2018 MacArthur Fellow and AMOC* co-founder Matthew Aucoin’s Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter III for baritone and chamber ensemble, sung by John Brancy, along with selections from the occult-inspired Spell Book by British American composer Freya Waley-Cohen (Dec 4).`
 
Vocalists Eliza Bagg, Catherine Brookman, Kayleigh Butcher, Charlotte Mundy, andKirsten Sollek are featured in the next performance, which also showcases Brookman as a composer with her work The Narrows, The Falls. Towering works by two distinguished composers and MacArthur “geniuses” bookend the program: Requiem by Courtney Bryan, “pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (New York Times), and John Zorn’s The Holy Visions (Feb 19).
 
Augusta Read Thomas’s latest album, Terpsichore’s Box of Dreams, was named “Recording of the Month” in June 2024 by BBC Music magazine, with the accompanying review declaring that her music “fizzes with [a] vivid sense of energy; her complex, imaginative scores verily zing with life and colour, while readily charting profound emotional depths.” Thomas curates the third “Visionary Sounds” concert, which includes her chamber works Bebop Riddle V, …a circle around the sun, and Toft Serenade, as well as music by Joan Tower, Tyson Gholston Davis, Chen Yi, and Paul Novak, a composer selected to participate in the DeGaetano Composition Institute being led by Thomas this season (April 30).

OSL presents Chamber Music Series

OSL’s Chamber Music Series hearkens back to the ensemble’s roots in 1974, when it was formed by a group of virtuosic chamber musicians performing in Greenwich Village. Programs are performed in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall. The series opens with a performance that recalls repertoire from OSL’s first season and features soprano Liv Redpath – whose effortless coloratura has left critics around the world grasping for new superlatives and who was heard as a soloist in last season’s Christmas Oratorio – and pianist George Li. Two soprano showpieces – Fauré’s La Bonne Chanson and Schubert’s Der Hirt auf dem Felsen – are complemented on the program by Mozart’s “Kegelstatt” Trio and songs by Schubert, Strauss, and Grieg (Oct 16).
 
In December, nuevo tango composer Astor Piazzolla is showcased in a concert featuring bandoneon player Julien Labro, who was a featured performer last season in the “Visionary Sounds” series. On the all-Argentine program, a range of compositions by Piazzolla is juxtaposed with Minguito by life-long bandoneon player and composer Dino Saluzzi, Ginastera’s Doce Preludios Americanos, and Diego Schissi’s Piazzolla-inspired Astor de Pibe (Dec 11).
 
Praised as “a superb pianist” and a “thoughtful, sensitive performer” by the New York Times, which also listed his Carnegie Hall debut as part of its “Best of Classical Music 2021,” young pianist Zhu Wang is the guest performer for a chamber concert focusing on music for winds. Barber’s Summer Music for wind quintet and Mozart’s Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat are paired with a chamber arrangement by David Carp of Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel and Beethoven’s “Gassenhauer” Piano Trio in B-flat (March 5).
 
The final concert in the Chamber Music Series features mezzo-soprano Susan Grahamand pianist Michael Boriskin in the New York premiere of Grammy Award-winning composer Richard Danielpour’s A Standing Witness, composed in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove (April 16). A 75-minute-long cycle of 14 songs and one instrumental elegy, A Standing Witness is a sweeping retrospective of momentous events and eras in American history over the past half-century, ranging from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy to the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Woodstock, 9/11 and more. 

DeGaetano Composition Institute

Augusta Read Thomas and conductor Brad Lubman lead the fifth season of OSL’s annual DeGaetano Composition Institute. Named in honor of the late composer and pianist Robert DeGaetano (1946–2015), the Institute supports the development of emerging composers and new works for chamber orchestra. Participants receive personalized mentorship, tailored professional guidance, and creative opportunities over the course of seven months, culminating in a week-long residency in New York City and a world premiere performance by OSL. The culmination of the 2025 Institute will be a concert of four OSL-commissioned world premieres for chamber orchestra by Institute composers Lukáš Janata, Paul Novak, Sofia Jen Ouyang, and Zihan Wu, at OSL’s home,The DiMenna Center for Classical Music (July 29).

Paul Taylor Dance Company performances 

OSL’s longstanding relationship with the Paul Taylor Dance Company (PTDC) continues for the company’s 2024 Lincoln Center Season, with OSL performing live on every program. Special guest ensemble Time For Three also performs on two of the pieces: Echo, with music by Kevin Puts, and Chaconne in Winter, with music by J.S. Bach and Justin Vernon, both choreographed by resident choreographer Lauren Lovette. Besides a wealth of iconic dances by the legendary Paul Taylor, set to the music of Bach, Poulenc, Handel, Debussy, late Taylor Music Director Donald York, and others, additional works for the season are choreographed by Larry Keigwin, Ulysses Dove, and Jody Sperling, whose Clair de Lune and Vive La Loïe! are choreographed in homage to iconic American dancer Loïe Fuller (Nov 5–Nov 24). 

Education and community engagement concert series

Each season, OSL travels to all five New York City boroughs with its free Five Borough Tour, representing the orchestra’s longstanding commitment to offering accessible performances to the New York City community. This season’s program features the music of Chen Yi, who participates in the performances along with the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, and Chen Tao and Liu Li playing the traditional Chinese instruments xiao and guqin. Works showcasing these instruments complement a program of Chen Yi’s works that also includes Zhou Long’s Chinese Folk Songs (March 23–29).
 
In December, OSL invites New York City’s public-school students to attend Free School Concerts, outstanding classical music performances designed especially for young people. These OSL concerts reach more than 10,000 children annually, and for many it is their first live orchestral experience. This winter’s program, “The Sounds Around Us with Kinan Azmeh,” features Azmeh as clarinetist and composer, with host Aya Aziz, percussionist John Hadfield, and Orchestra of St. Luke’s conducted by Tito Muñoz (Dec 11–13).

DiMenna Center Benefit and other performances

The annual DiMenna Center benefit features host Susan Graham with special guest soprano Erin Morley, who was featured this past spring at Carnegie Hall in Brahms’s A German Requiem led by Labadie. They join OSL for an intimate afternoon of song and conversation to celebrate its education and community programs, which have been a central pillar of the orchestra’s mission since its founding (Sep 9).
 
A special fall event celebrates OSL’s 50th anniversary season with a return to the site of the group’s first concert at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields. Joined by soprano Amanda Forsythe and the Youth Orchestra of St. Luke’s (YOSL), the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble performs Bach’s Cantata No. 51, Beethoven’s Septet in E-flat, and the first movement from Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto, performed side-by-side with YOSL members (Oct 26).
 
On the mainstage at Carnegie Hall, OSL joins soprano Diana Newman, narrators Judith and Leah Pisar, the Bard Festival Chorale, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, all led by conductor James Conlon, for a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish (Jan 29).
 
On April 28, OSL’s annual Gift of Music Gala honors OSL musicians as they celebrate the orchestra’s 50th anniversary. The event includes cocktails, dinner, an OSL concert, and dancing.
 
Finally, an evening-length immersive co-production celebrates two milestone anniversaries – OSL’s 50th and Baryshnikov Arts’ 20th – with Vivaldi’s iconic The Four Seasons, interspersed with the sounds of nature, Angélica Negrón’s Marejada, and Anna Clyne’s Woman Holding a Balance. Lighting design is by Jennifer Tipton, a MacArthur “genius” fellow and one of most renowned designers for dance, opera, and theater (May 8).

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