What if a European government decided that the Jews were a curse on their country and had to be gotten rid of? You may be surprised to learn that someone imagined it decades before Hitler’s Final Solution. Thanks to Parlando, Ian Niederhoffer’s forward-looking chamber orchestra, a New York audience just had the chance to experience this disturbing vision in multimedia.
Parlando Will Launch 2026-27 Season With Pay-What-You-Can Tickets
Ian Niederhoffer leads the chamber orchestra in programs featuring Parker Ramsay, Morgan Mastrangelo and Devony Smith.
Parlando has announced its 2026-27 season, at Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center. Led by conductor and founder Ian Niederhoffer, whose vision is for every concert to tell a story, Parlando presents a series of riveting programs designed to challenge and reward music fans with rarely programmed music.
The season opens October 4 with a matinee screening and live performance of Olga Neuwirth's 2018 score to Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews), a 1924 Austrian satire that imagines a Vienna purged of its Jewish population. The following shows include harpist Parker Ramsay on a program of gauchos and nationalist music from Mexico, Argentina, and Czechoslovakia; tenor Morgan Mastrangelo, who joins Parlando for an evening of Schnittke and Zappa, skewering bureaucratic absurdity; and mezzo-soprano Devony Smith, closing the season with new orchestrations of songs from her Grammy-nominated album In This Short Life.
The concerts take place October 4, December 4, February 19, and April 10. For the first time in Parlando's history, all tickets will be offered pay-what-you-can.
'I'm thrilled for this season,' said Niederhoffer, who introduces the musical and historical context of each piece from the stage. 'If this summer's Odyssey is any indication, we are turning to history and classics to try and explain the world around us. I believe classical music has that same power.'
Since founding Parlando in 2019, Niederhoffer has displayed a knack for curating unique and fascinating programs, and audiences have come to expect and look forward to his delightful elucidations about the pieces.
Parlando: 2026-27 season, Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center
Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews)
Sunday | October 4, 2026 | 3 p.m.
Ian Niederhoffer, conductor
OLGA NEUWIRTH - Live score to Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews, dir. Hans Karl Breslauer, 1924)
In 1924, Austrian director Hugo Bettauer released a satirical film imagining a Vienna purged of its Jewish population, a darkly comic warning drawn from the rhetoric of Austria's rising nationalist politicians. One year later, Bettauer was assassinated by a Nazi gunman who was subsequently acquitted and celebrated. The film was banned in 1933 and nearly lost to history until a pristine print was discovered at a Paris flea market in 2015. Parlando opens its season with a screening with live orchestra of the newly restored Die Stadt ohne Juden, featuring Olga Neuwirth's 2018 score - a visceral, urgent work that transforms a century-old cautionary tale into an ominously contemporary one.
Cowboy Nations
Friday | December 4, 2026 | 7:30 p.m.
Parker Ramsay, harp
Ian Niederhoffer, conductor
SILVESTRE REVUELTAS - Ocho por Radio
ALBERTO GINASTERA - Harp Concerto
ERWIN SCHULHOFF - Symphony No. 1
How do you make a "people" around music? Cowboy Nations explores how three composers across three continents wrestled with and created identity, politics, and belonging through sound. From Mexico's Silvestre Revueltas to Argentina's Alberto Ginastera to Czechoslovakia's Erwin Schulhoff, these composers grappling with the 20th century's complicated legacy of nationalist music reveal as much about our own cultural moment as it does about theirs. Harpist Parker Ramsay joins Parlando for Ginastera's Harp Concerto in a program asking what the last century of identity-driven music can tell us about who we can become through music.
Zappa Files His Taxes
Friday | February 19, 2027 | 7:30 p.m.
Morgan Mastrangelo, tenor
Ian Niederhoffer, conductor
ALFRED SCHNITTKE - Gogol Suite
FRANK ZAPPA - The Adventures of Gregory Peccary
How can music capture the absurdity of modern life and bureaucracy? Alfred Schnittke's Gogol Suite channels the grotesque comedy of 19th-century Russia's greatest satirist, while Frank Zappa's Adventures of Gregory Peccary sends a hapless pig through a labyrinth of corporate nonsense and calendar reform. Tenor Morgan Mastrangelo joins Parlando as satirical music takes aim at the mundane.
In This Short Life
Saturday | April 10, 2027 | 7:30 p.m.
Devony Smith, mezzo-soprano
Ian Niederhoffer, conductor
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG - Chamber Symphony No. 1
TORU TAKEMITSU - Rain Coming
LUCIANO BERIO - Beatles Songs
DAVID LANG, WILL LIVERMAN, JAKE LANDAU - Songs from In This Short Life
After the catastrophe of World War I, much of classical music turned from Romantic emotionality to objectivity, structure, and cool intelligence. But was this cool intelligence sufficient in capturing the spectrum of 20th-century emotion? In This Short Life traces that arc from Schoenberg's first explorations of serialism, through Takemitsu's luminous impressionism and Berio's tender reimagining of the Beatles, to art songs by David Lang, Will Liverman, and Jake Landau from In This Short Life, a Grammy-nominated meditation on love, life, and the ephemeral. Mezzo-soprano Devony Smith joins Parlando for a season finale about what endures when the modern world strips everything else away.
Parlando and conductor Ian Niederhoffer concluded their season Wednesday night with the second part of their series, “The Cabaret Project.” Spanning this season and last, the series has Parlando playing chamber orchestra arrangements of cabaret music, and cabaret-adjacent works in the classical repertoire.
This is a deeply fascinating question to explore, as Niederhofer hinted at in his introductions before each work, and presented in an enticing program: Emil Bauer’s arrangement of Ernst Krenek’s Fantasie Jonny spielt auf; Hanns Eisler’s Kleine Sinfonie; an orchestration of Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit; and Aaron Davis’ song cycle on poems by Margaret Atwood, Zombie Blizzard. Davis played piano on “Strange Fruit,” and soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee joined Parlando on the Merkin Hall stage as vocal soloist in the last two works.
Why is this work a masterpiece? That thought must have been on some minds as Ian Niederhoffer led Parlando in Georg Friedrich Haas’ in vain at Merkin Hall on Sunday afternoon.
To the composer’s fans in the audience, it was self-evident. For others, even if they were not quite convinced of its lofty status, they undoubtedly realized that they had experienced something monumental, if inexplicable.
Can art make you a better person? The question emerges from the German concept of bildung. By one definition, the idea is to combine “education, cultivation, personal formation and character, emotional and moral development, and maturation.” Goethe and others considered art an essential component of bildung. So, can art make you a better person? Ian Niederhoffer and his chamber orchestra Parlando posed the question at the ensemble’s season-opening concert on October 7, 2025, with music by Felix Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss, and the early-20th-century German-Jewish composer Franz Schreker.
The program’s title, “The Broken Promise,” suggests an answer in the negative. But through the music and Niederhoffer’s introductions, the conductor’s take turned out not to be that simple. The cogently conceived, emotionally packed concert both embraced and challenged the bildung ideal.
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.