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.