Parlando has revealed its 2025-26 season, led by conductor and founder Ian Niederhoffer. For the new season, Niederhoffer and Parlando return to Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center, on October 7, December 7, February 22, and April 22. Each Parlando program is held together by a unifying theme, blending new or rarely-performed works with more familiar ones. Tickets are available now for single concerts ($30-$40), or as a four-concert subscription ($80-$100).

One of the most daring programs Parlando has offered since its 2019 founding - and a rare treat for contemporary music aficionados - is a full performance of in vain, on Feb. 22, by the reigning Austrian avant-gardist Georg Friedrich Haas, one of the most innovative and artistically uncompromising composers at work today. Written as a response to the rise of the far right in Austria and premiered in 2000, in vain is scored for 24 instruments and explores microtonality and the acoustic properties of sound, creating tonalities and sound textures so striking and novel that they sometimes appear to be electronically manipulated. Different levels of low lighting, even darkness, blend with the music over the course of the hour-long performance. The British conductor Simon Rattle declared the piece "one of the first masterpieces of the 21st century."

"I'm thrilled to bring these programs to the Kaufman Center this season," says Niederhoffer. "It's our most narratively dramatic season to date, from the human and heartbreaking arc of 19th-century German Jewry to cabaret's evolution from social satire to personal storytelling, culminating in a world-premiere orchestration of Zombie Blizzard, a genre-bending song cycle with texts by Margaret Atwood. Our 2025-26 season features a deep connection between the repertoire and the world around us that I can't wait to share."

Parlando: 2025-26 season
Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center

-The Broken Promise-

October 7, 2025 | 7:30 p.m.

• Felix Mendelssohn - Son and Stranger Overture

• Franz Schreker - The Birthday of the Infanta Suite

• Richard Strauss - Metamorphosen

Can art make you a better person? From promise to heartbreak, this powerful program traces the rise and fall of a culture that once believed art could save it. Parlando explores the story of German-Jewish life and identity through three striking works: Felix Mendelssohn's bright and joyful Son and Stranger Overture, Franz Schreker's lush and bittersweet Birthday of the Infanta Suite, and Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen, a haunting elegy written in the ruins of World War II. Together, they paint a portrait of hope, beauty, and the devastating betrayal of both German Jewry and Germany itself.

-Crossing Over-

December 7, 2025 | 3 p.m.

• Dmitri Shostakovich - Jazz Suite No. 1

• Nikolai Kapustin - Piano Concerto No. 2, ft. Maxim Lando

• Duke Ellington - Nutcracker Suite

How different is classical music from jazz, really? From smoky Soviet salons to mid-century Manhattan, jazz has left its mark on even the most unexpected corners of classical music. Join Parlando for a foot-tapping, genre-crossing evening that explores how classical composers borrowed the rhythms, harmonies, and swing of jazz to create something entirely new. The program features Shostakovich's sly and stylish Jazz Suite No. 1, Kapustin's electrifying Piano Concerto No. 2, performed by rising star Maxim Lando, and Duke Ellington's dazzling transformation of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite.

-In Vain-

February 22, 2026 | 3 p.m.

• Georg Friedrich Haas - in vain

What does it mean to make music in complete darkness? Join Parlando for an immersive performance of Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain, a gripping, hourlong work that bends time, light, and memory. Written in response to the far-right's resurgence in Austria and described by conductor Simon Rattle as "one of the first masterpieces of the 21st century," in vain confronts the fragility of democracy through waves of harmony, shimmering stillness, and sudden rupture. As politics around the world grow darker, Haas offers both a warning and a vision: a plea to keep listening, even when the lights go out.

-The Cabaret Project, Part II-

April 22, 2025 | 7:30 p.m.

• Ernst Krenek - Fantasie Jonny spielt auf for Salon Orchestra

• Hanns Eisler - Kleine Sinfonie

• Abel Meeropol - Strange Fruit ft. Measha Brueggergosman-Lee

• Aaron Davis/Margaret Atwood - Zombie Blizzard (World Premiere Orchestration), ft. Measha Brueggergosman-Lee

From smoky Berlin nightclubs to today's jazz clubs, cabaret walks the line between satire and story. Join Parlando for The Cabaret Project: Part II, the second chapter of a two-season collaboration with soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, exploring cabaret's blend of sharp-edged social commentary and deeply personal storytelling. This eclectic program features Ernst Krenek's jazzy Fantasie on Jonny spielt auf, Hans Eisler's punchy Kleine Sinfonie, and Abel Meeropol's haunting Strange Fruit, the searing ballad made famous by Billie Holiday. The concert features a world premiere orchestration of Zombie Blizzard by Aaron Davis and Margaret Atwood, a biting, humorous and moving song cycle about gender, loss, and the strange beauty of survival.

WESTERLY — The advertisement for the movie showing at the Bliven Opera House in the Dec. 26, 1916 issue of The Westerly Sun urged readers: “Don’t Miss It For It’s Great.”

The movie, “American Aristocracy,” wasn't just any movie — it was a silent film starring Douglas Fairbanks, which had been filmed in Watch Hill because Fairbanks was staying there with his in-laws. 

Now, more than a century later, on Aug. 10, "American Aristocracy,” returns to Westerly, this time at the United, and will be accompanied by a newly created orchestral score, performed live by the New York City chamber orchestra Parlando.

Parlando concluded its season with the launch of “The Cabaret Project” at Merkin Hall on Thursday evening. Running less than an hour, the concert showcased works by composers outside the mainstream, featuring colorful orchestrations and an interesting backstory. It proved the kind of imaginative and historically grounded musical experience expected from Ian Niederhoffer, founder and conductor of Parlando. 

What an ironically appropriate combination of names here with performers Parlando (in Italian, “speaking”) and their debut release, Censored Anthems. It’s a fairly new band, formed under the leadership of conductor Ian Niederhoffer only in 2019, and specialising in performing under-performed music.

Even given Parlando’s high bar for the eclectic, with the program “Sidewalk Tango” Ian Niederhoffer raised it a notch or two above.

The thematic red thread running through Parlando’s Sunday afternoon concert at Merkin Hall was the symbiotic relationship between energy and change. For Niederhoffer, that phenomenon manifests itself in the world’s ever-evolving great cities, such as Berlin, Seoul, and Buenos Aires, all of which were represented musically by the afternoon’s three chosen composers.

The music of the night was the theme of the first concert of the new season from the chamber orchestra Parlando. But as conductor Ian Niederhoffer pointed out in his introduction, “night” has many flavors, and many emotional connotations. Composers have evoked them in countless ways over the centuries. This “Night Music” program drew on Mozart, Fauré, Bartók, and Tōru Takemitsu to prove the point.

Fauré’s “Nocturne” from his Shylock Suite, incidental music to a late-19th-century French production of The Merchant of Venice, is only a couple of minutes long. But here it functioned as more than an introduction or appetizer. The string orchestra produced a cool, glowing sound that evoked the romantic spirit of the night while establishing Mr. Niederhoffer’s tasteful sense of balance and tone.

The enduring theme of night music — the nocturne — was explored in the latest Merkin Hall performance by Parlando. Conductor Ian Niederhoffer, who founded this promising chamber orchestra in 2019, conceived and led a packed house through an insightful and captivating rumination on the musical night-scape.

Niederhoffer ingeniously emphasized — in generous spoken introductions to the pieces — the heightened emotions experienced after sun down. And the evening’s repertoire captured some of the various ways composers have been inspired by night to harness those intense feelings.

WESTERLY — Parlando, the New York City-based chamber orchestra known for "bringing intimate and accessible orchestral experiences to wider audiences," returns to Westerly this weekend for its second performance at the United.

"We had so much fun, how could we not return," said Parlando founder and director Ian Niederhoffer on the telephone Tuesday morning.

"It was an absolute no-brainer," he added with a laugh, noting that laughter is actually the focus of this year's program and the chamber orchestra plans to "turn up the humor" for an unforgettable evening of laughs, wittiness and harmony."

Parlando, the chamber orchestra founded in 2019 by Ian Niederhoffer, offered an evening of music about music: the subject was Mozart, and works by Reynaldo Hahn, Alfred Schnittke, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov were performed. 

‘Every concert tells a story’ is the motto of Parlando, a New York-based chamber orchestra founded in 2019 by Ian Niederhoffer, whose aim is to engage audiences in a shared sense of discovery through creative programming. Their most recent concert – the third in a season of four programs they regularly present at Merkin Hall – told several stories.

Not the least of these involves the remarkably effective formula Niederhoffer and his ensemble have been refining to build a welcoming, quasi-familiar bond with their listeners. Parlando’s bond is its brand. Each program’s works are chosen to illustrate aspects of a given theme. That is hardly an unusual practice, but the connections Niederhoffer posits are typically subtle and thought-provoking. Most importantly, the unifying themes connect topics we face in our lives in general as human beings with inherently musical concepts or processes.

Sunday afternoon’s theme was ‘Transient Voices’, referring to music’s capacity to ‘capture the ephemera’ – which Niederhoffer discussed in his introductory comments. That too is part of the brand: unfussy, easy-to-follow chats that are smart, articulate and packed with suggestions for tangents that might be helpful to audience members at any level of familiarity with classical tradition.

Niederhoffer described the ephemeral nature of music itself as a characteristic that equips this art with a special ability to help us cope with the impermanence we experience – not just to be more mindful of that condition, but to appreciate how what seems transient can endure – just as music, a transient phenomenon par excellence that dissolves into silence at the end of each performance, can reawaken dormant memories.

Without contrivance, Niederhoffer toggles between the abstract and the most concrete musical detail. Part of his uniquely compelling talent is an ability to bring these ideas to life without seeming reductive or oversimplified. This is an alternative to the predictable patterns of program music thinking, in which a one-to-one correspondence might be emphasized between, say, a dissonant climax and a stabbing in the associated story. What interests Niederhoffer and his Parlando musicians – and what they seek to engage the audience in experiencing – is how music tells these stories through specifically and uniquely musical details.

An affinity for underrepresented works or lesser-known pieces of the repertoire is likewise part of Parlando’s identity. Niederhoffer opened with Umbra, a short piece for string orchestra by Aida Shirazi from 2017. Born in Tehran in 1987, Shirazi cofounded the Iranian Female Composers Association as a platform to support creative work by young artists across the Iranian diaspora. The topic of transience in this case, according to Niederhoffer, is related to memories of a distant home. Shirazi went abroad to the West to study music, earning her doctorate at the University of California, Davis.

She channels a sense of being out of place, disconnected with her home culture, into the unsettling, shadowy, in-the-margins textures of Umbra – a moment of eclipse that totally blocks the light source. Niederhoffer shaped ultra-sensitive nuances of volume and textural weight to enhance the music’s compelling internal drama of filtered memories, with brief pizzicatos recalling haunting impressions of the santur, the ancient Iranian hammered dulcimer (a guidepost the conductor, in his prefatory remarks, pointed out).

Parlando’s concerts are designed to be efficient and compact – no intermission, but a chance to unwind in the lobby afterward and perhaps gather to chat further about the music. The performances are ideally calibrated to the intimacy and warm acoustic of Merkin Hall, which looked to be close to capacity (449 seats) with a fully attentive audience.

The main course was Shostakovich’s Symphony No.14, music that directly confronts the ultimate fact of human transience: the death that ends each story. The composer sketched the score at white heat during a hospital stay in 1969, when he was gripped by thoughts of imminent death. Niederhoffer is only in his twenties, but he showed an uncanny sympathy for this late work of an artist obsessed not just with death’s ineluctability but with its omnipresence. That, in a nutshell, is the ‘story’ of the Fourteenth, a work unusually structured as a sequence of eleven movements, each setting a poem dealing with the topic of death – most often a violent, cruel and tragic death that arrives prematurely. The scoring is similarly unconventional: string orchestra with two percussionists and two vocal soloists (soprano and bass).

Niederhoffer presided over a tautly dramatic interpretation, playing up Shostakovich’s radical contrasts of the lower depths of cellos and double bass with frantically screaming violins in highest register. Principal cellist Diana Golden contributed especially memorable lines of mournful cantabile, while the ensemble’s unison figurations and accents emanated a stark beauty.

For his poetic stories of death, Shostakovich chose four sources, using Russian translations (paraphrases and even rewritings would be a more accurate description) of non-Russian poets: Federico García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Küchelbeker (in the pivotal ninth movement about a hero killed by the tyrannical state) and, in the epilogue-like final two movements, Rainer Maria Rilke. English translations were projected as surtitles.

Niederhoffer offered a fluent introduction to the background of Shostakovich’s tormented career, referring to a depiction of prison-camp life in one of the songs as another example of the composer ‘giving a musical middle finger to Stalin’. He also addressed the great paradox of the Symphony No.14: that music of such unrelenting, indeed exhausting, bleakness can impart a restorative feeling that even approaches joy. As Shostakovich himself put it: ‘I want listeners to this symphony to realize that “life” is truly beautiful. My symphony is an impassioned protest against death, a reminder to the living that they should live honestly, conscientiously, nobly, never committing a base act’.

Soprano Irina Rindzuner and bass Mikhail Svetlov gave impassioned accounts of their parts, investing them with genuinely operatic intensity and effective touches of characterization to give each vignette or setting a recognizable atmosphere. They were also well-matched, joining voices in the final movement for the first time to devastatingly powerful effect in the poetry of Rilke.

Parlando’s next and final program of the season, ‘The Other Mozart Effect’, will take place on 1 May.

Ian Niederhoffer may need to tweak his patented chili-pepper ranking system for gauging the listener difficulty of musical works. 

For “Transient Voices,”Parlando’s latest program, Aida Shirazi’s Umbra earned a difficulty rating of three and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14 a two on a scale of five. Reasonable minds may disagree with him and may have wanted to kick both up a notch or two.

But without question Sunday’s performance by the chamber orchestra at Merkin Hall was off the scale for its integrity and emotional impact. Apart from his abundant talents as a conductor, Niederhoffer’s appeal rests in his musical curiosity and ability to discern commonalities in extremely disparate works. In his preconcert remarks, the conductor explained that composers have the unique ability to capture the ephemeral and preserve it in music. For Niederhoffer, that was the thread which linked Shirazi’s brief work and the Shostakovich symphony.

Born and raised in Tehran, Shirazi is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. Umbra (Clouds) is a departure of sorts for the California-based composer as it is not based on a literary source. 

The Iranian composer’s objective in creating Umbra was to depict a very personal and introspective journey through music. Scored for strings, Umbra evolves though almost imperceptible changes, which Shirazi compares to a floating three-dimensional object rotating at a very slow pace. Shiraz interjects slabs of luminous, transparent sound with fascinating musical outbursts. These included exquisite dissonances, pizzicati, and unusual bowing techniques. Niederhoffer placed each one perfectly, giving the music an inherent vitality despite its static nature.

Shirazi also enhanced the sense of motion by silence. The glacial movement of the music was frequently stopped by a pause, which conductor and orchestra imbedded with mystery and a sense of apprehension. 

As its title implies, at its core Umbra is about ephemera. The work ended with the music simply evaporating into a calming nothingness, held  by audience members for an extended period.

Niederhoffer cannot be challenged on stating that Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14 is one of the darkest works in the repertoire. Suffering from various debilitating ailments in the final years of his life, Shostakovich’s fixation on death found its ultimate expression in his penultimate symphony, which he might easily have cast as a song cycle or oratorio.

Composed in 1969, it is a setting of eleven poems by Federico García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire. Wilhelm Küchelbecker and Rainer Maria Rilke for two voices and a chamber orchestra of strings and percussion. The poets, of whom only Küchelbecker was Russian, all died young and tragically.

Shostakovich addressed death without a trace of sentimentality and certainly no hope for redemption. The brutality of life under Stalin had robbed him of such illusions. Nonetheless, the symphony’s emotional power and the strange beauty of the orchestral score makes the Fourteenth Symphony not only one of the composer’s most personal works, but also among his greatest.

Niederhoffer was born to conduct this music. The work clearly engages him intellectually and spiritually, as well as musically. He brought the weight of history to this performance, by making the dark sentiments of the poets’s texts resonate with the world in which we live. It is also music which requires the finest precision and passion, are two of Niederhoffer’s greatest strengths as a conductor.

His choice of soloists, soprano Irina Rinzuner and bass-baritone Mikhail Svetlov, brought grandeur and gravitas to the performance. The Russian-born Svetlov possesses a cavernous voice capable of expressing the most profound of emotions. Rinzuner, an American soprano, has an instrument of considerable size and thrust, but also of great beauty. Her classic elegance summoned the spirit of the great Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, who sang in the first performances of the work in Moscow.

The third song, a setting of Apollinaire’s “Lorelei,” displayed both singers at their dramatic best in an intensely dramatic reading of the tale. Rinzuner’s spot-on pitch and vocal placement combined with the tolling of bells for a spine-tingling effect. She was equally effective in the setting of Apollinaire’s “The Suicide,” singing of a tormented man whose body lies in a grave marked by three lilies, but no cross.

The emotional core of the symphony rests in the setting for bass of another Apollinaire poem, “At the Santé Prison.” It is the lament of a prisoner stripped naked lying alone in a cell, whose identity has been reduced to a number. Svetlov sang with restrained intensity, poignantly depicting the man’s despair and fleeting memories of his youth in a remarkable range of vocal color and dynamics ranging from pale and haunting to full-blooded howls of terror.

The sounds which Niederhoffer drew from his players matched the intensity and dramatic impact of the two soloists. Especially potent was the playing of the lower strings which conjured the gloom that often pervades the work. There are also moments of luminescent, almost eerie beauty in the score which the violins captured perfectly, as did the percussionists (on bells, castanets, tom-toms, slapstick, vibraphone, wood block, xylophone, and celesta).

The soloists only sing together in the final song, a setting of Rilke’s “Conclusion.” Niederhoffer suggested that there was a glimmer of hope in this final expression of the greatness and inevitability of death, but there was none in this performance . It was, however, as Shostakovich intended, a sublime musical depiction of an utterly bleak finale that was honest and true to life.

What's the link between the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died in June, and the early-20th-century titans Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Darius Milhaud? A mutual flair for the theatrical, which is reflected in the title of Parlando's concert on Sunday:

"Melodrama."

While all three artists wrote operas, this chamber orchestra will focus on some smaller yet substantial works: Milhaud's "Le Bœuf sur le toit," Saariaho's "Graal théâtre" (featuring the violinist Geneva Lewis), and Korngold's "Much Ado About Nothing" Suite.

By giving short spoken introductions to each piece from the stage, the orchestra's conductor and founder, Ian Niederhoffer, makes good on its motto: "Every concert tells a story." But smart, unusual programming on this level fosters a gripping narrative of its own, too.