Announcing the Charlotte Symphony’s 2026–27 Season: A Shortlist of 8 Concerts to Prioritize

February 24, 2026

Lawrence Toppman

By Lawrence Toppman

Forgive me if, when writing about things that most excite me in the 2026-27 Charlotte Symphony Orchestra season, I blow off Beethoven.

Yes, he’s one of the three greatest composers who ever lived. (The others are Bach and whoever you like, Mozart for me.) But the imminent arrival of his Violin Concerto, his Piano Concerto No. 4 and his Symphony No. 9 seem like business as usual, though Kwamé Ryan has conducted none of them here.

He may want to put his own stamp on the orchestra in his second full season as music director. Beethoven’s Ninth held special importance for Christopher Warren-Green; he conducted it here multiple times, including performances in May 2022 in his farewell as music director. Ryan will also conduct Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” the piece Warren-Green led beautifully at his audition concert 17 years ago to get the job. Meet the new boss – not the same as the old boss.

You can find all the 2026-27 concerts here, from the annual gala with Joshua Bell playing Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 to a musical adaptation of Dan Brown’s book “Wild Symphony” for kids. I encourage you to browse. For now, I’m going to cherry-pick eight things I care most about.

1) Levi Taylor will be the second Spotlight Artist after Gabriel Kahane, who’s with the CSO this season. You can sample Taylor’s music at his website. He’ll open the Classical Series Oct. 9-10 with the curtain-raiser “One Foot After the Other” and be back Jan. 15-16 with a new work the CSO says is “commissioned in honor of the United States’s 250th anniversary (and) draws on the words of civil rights leader John Lewis and his call to make ‘good trouble’.”

2) Americans. Our semiquincentennial (“half of 500 years”) inspired the programming of two piano concertos, Samuel Barber’s (Jan. 15-16, with Orion Weiss) and George Gershwin’s (March 12-13, with Michelle Cann). The latter will join Barber’s Symphony No. 1 and Julia Adolphe’s “Underneath the Sheen” in an all-American program.

3) Bruckner. Warren-Green was something of a Mahler specialist, and I’d be thrilled if Ryan followed a similar path with Anton Bruckner. He’s conducting Bruckner’s Ninth, his unfinished but spiritually powerful final symphony, May 21-23, alongside Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos. Two soloists who distinguished themselves earlier this season, Ran Dank (Prokofiev’s Third) and Soyeon Kate Lee (Beach Concerto), will team up.

4) Schubert’s Ninth, the greatest symphony written before 1850 by someone who wasn’t named Ludwig. It’s paired Oct. 23-25 with Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” (“Songs on the Death of Children”), sung by Raehann Bryce-Davis, and Carlos Simon’s “Fate Now Conquers,” inspired by a journal entry in which Beethoven surrenders to destiny.

5) The coolest concert of the season, as far as I know now. (I can’t vouch for works I haven’t heard.) It takes place April 30-May 1 under guest conductor Erina Yashima and consists of three playful pieces from the first half of the 20^th century: Lili Boulanger’s tone poem “Of a Spring Morning,” Francis Poulenc’s robust and theatrical “Gloria” (with Charlotte Master Chorale and a soprano TBA), and Stravinsky’s sardonic ballet “Petrushka.”

6) Improv night. Trumpeter Pacho Flores will improvise in Gabriela Ortiz’s “Altar de Bronce” (“Bronze Altar”), called by the CSO “a work of molten textures.” Silvestre Revueltas’ “Tribute to Federico García Lorca” will also heat things up. Those run April 16-17 alongside three short pieces by Debussy and Ravel, conducted by Cosette Justo Valdéz.

7) A big night for Calin Ovidiu Lupanu. The CSO concertmaster will play Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto, a long and juicy piece (some would say too long) full of Armenian folk influences and cinematic flourishes. I never get enough of Dvořák, so his Seventh Symphony will be a welcome pairing, along with the Rachmaninov tone poem “The Rock.” Hans Graf will conduct April 2 – 4.

8) I don’t always include Pops Series entries, but I’ll go out of my way for “The Heart of the Blues” Jan. 22-23. Byron Stripling (conductor, trumpet, vocals), Sydney McSweeney (vocals) and Bobby Floyd (keyboard) pay tribute to Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters and others. That concert also turns up Jan. 23 at 11 a.m. in the Family Series. I had no idea Rainey, Smith and Waters, masters of the double entendre about sex – often the single entendre, actually – sang anything suitable for listeners under drinking age. I live and learn.