The 2025/26 season of concert programming at Koerner Hall, the venue’s 17th, offers a range of experiences for audience members from international stars to homegrown talent. Superstar soprano Renée Fleming performs at a special event, Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra come to visit — and Toronto’s own The Happenstancers headline a concert at the annual 21C Music Festival.
The season will feature new works by composers Danilo Pérez, Gabriela Montero, Osvaldo Golijov, Stewart Goodyear, Vincent Ho, Katharine Petkovski, Dean Burry, and Scott Tixier.
“The Royal Conservatory’s 2025-26 concert season is a vibrant celebration of musical excellence, presented across our three stages — Koerner Hall, Mazzoleni Concert Hall, and Temerty Theatre,” said Alexander Brose, Michael and Sonja Koerner President & CEO of The Royal Conservatory of Music in a statement.
“This year, we are especially proud to honour the 100th birthday of legendary jazz pianist and RCM alumnus Oscar Peterson with special programming that celebrates his enduring legacy. We are also extremely excited to launch our new Orchestrated series that showcases our Glenn Gould School students side-by-side with genre-bending performers. From internationally acclaimed artists to emerging voices, our carefully curated season reflects The Royal Conservatory’s deep commitment to transformative cultural experiences that inspire and connect us all.”
Here’s a look at the season highlights for classical music lovers.
RCM 2025/26 at Koerner Hall
Executive Director of Performing Arts Mervon Mehta comments, “As we embark on our 17th season (can you believe it!) of presenting great artists for a discerning audience, I am struck by how many supremely talented artists are eager to play in our magnificent Koerner Hall. It allows us to confirm a singular truth that, as a species, we will always have the need to gather for shared experiences.
“It is a primal need. This is not anything new… Greeks and Romans knew this and built their impressive amphitheatres for that purpose. Studies show that experiencing music, or art or sports or religion, as a group is a vastly different and more satisfying experience than watching alone on a screen. Part of that is the validation of those around you. We also know that when groups gather and are engaged with their whole selves — mind, body, and soul — human connections happen, serotonin and endorphins are released, joy and sometimes sadness abound, and heart rates synchronize between us and with the artists who invite us into their worlds. In short, it creates community. In these challenging times, we look forward to creating a beautiful community with you.”
Season Hightlights
Exclusive Signature Event
Superstar soprano Renée Fleming presents An Intimate Evening with Renée Fleming: Voice of Nature: the Anthropocene Recital accompanied by the Royal Conservatory Orchestra on November 1. The program is inspired by Fleming’s 2023 Grammy Award-winning album, with repertoire that ranges from Handel to Björk tonThe Lord of the Rings.
International Orchestra Series
Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, with mezzo-soprano Gerhild Romberger, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, and the Toronto Children’s Chorus, perform Mahler’s monumental Symphony No. 3 for orchestra, mezzo-soprano, women’s choir, and children’s choir on February 12.
Orchestrated
This new series with the Royal Conservatory Orchestra blends sound and style in a full-immersion experience for the audience that will include a night of specialty cocktails and meet-ups at pre-concert receptions, spotlighting new sounds from three artists who blur the lines between genres:
- Cory Wong
- Kishi Bashi
- Dragonette with Tiny Sun
Pianist Gabriela Montero improvises with the audience in Hong Kong:
21C Music Festival
The 13th iteration of the 21C Music stretches from January to May of 2026, and highlights music composed during the 21st century, often with a fluid sense of genre.
- The Happenstancers: Always Darkest … Dawn Always: This program traces a single night, from Arnold Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, with the up and down tensions of two lovers as a kind of thread running through it. The program also includes three settings of Josquin de Prez’s Renaissance song Mille Regretz (1000 Regrets) with contemporary chamber works, each reimagined as corresponding to different moments during the night.
- Gabriela Montero explores the migration of Eastern European composers to Los Angeles for work in the film industry, along with Montero’s signature classical improvisations as she accompanies Charlie Chaplin’s film The Immigrant. The first half of the program includes works by Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, and Stravinsky.
- Tony Yike Yang, the youngest-ever laureate in the history of the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, celebrates Chinese New Year with the Ontario premieres of selections from Vincent Ho’s The Twelve Chinese Zodiac Animals, Book 2: Preludes and Fugues.
- 21C Afterhours: GGS New Music Ensemble, curated and conducted by Brian Current. The program, titled The Broken Mirrors of Time, includes Alison Yun-Fei Jiang brand-new piano concerto commissioned by The Glenn Gould School, Christopher Mayo’s saxophone concerto in its world premiere, and The Broken Mirrors of Time by acclaimed South African composer Andile Khumalo.
- New Worlds: Music of Golijov: Associate Dean of The Glenn Gould School and Director of The Taylor Academy, Barry Shiffman leads a concert of works by Argentine-American composer Osvaldo Golijov, including Tintype, a new work co-commissioned by The Royal Conservatory for viola and string quintet.
- Brad Mehldau with Kirill Gerstein in a concert that brings classical music and jazz together. Mehldau is both improviser and formalist, and both sides resonate with pianist curator and educator Kirill Gerstein.
Pop & Beyond
- Sofiane Pamart, one of the top 10 most streamed classical music artists in the world, makes his Koerner Hall debut.
- Chris Thile, a Grammy Award-winning mandolinist, singer, songwriter, composer, and MacArthur Fellow recipient of the prestigious “Genius Grant” performs.
- Loreena McKennitt: Under A Winter’s Moon is a holiday celebration of carols and stories that blends Celtic, Indigenous, and Welsh cultures.
Classical Music Concerts
Piano Recitals
- Stephen Kovacevich performs piano sonatas by Beethoven, Schubert, and Berg on October 5.
- Sir András Schiff — after a long and illustrious career, Sir András Schiff is no longer providing exact recital programs in advance and prefers to announce his repertoire from the stage on November 2.
- Jan Lisiecki, the Juno Award winning UNESCO Ambassador, and alumnus of The Royal Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School, plays Preludes by Chopin, Bach, Messiaen, and Rachmaninov on November 16.
- Canadian pianist Tony Siqi Yun, Gold Medalist at the First China International Music Competition, performs works by Bach, Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms at his Koerner Hall debut on November 23.
- Seong-Jin Cho, First Prize winner at the Chopin International Competition in Warsaw returns to Koerner Hall with a program of Bartók, Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt on November 29.
- Víkingur Ólafsson, dubbed “Iceland’s Glenn Gould” by The New York Times, returns to Koerner Hall on February 1 with a program centred around Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 30.
- Yefim Bronfman, the GRAMMY Award-winning, Uzbekistan-born classical pianist, performs a program that will include Debussy, Prokofiev, Schumann, and Brahms’s Piano Sonata No. 3 on February 22.
- Marc-André Hamelin with Charles Richard-Hamelin, in a concert that brings together two of Canada’s greatest pianists to perform repertoire for two pianos by Mozart, Chopin, Gershwin, and others on March 29, the International Piano Day.
Vocal
- Matthias Goerne with Daniil Trifonov perform their rendition of Schubert’s iconic Winterreise on October 16.
- Isabel Bayrakdarian: Ancestral Songs, Prayers, and Lullabies with special guest Kevork Mourad, who will be drawing live during the concert of beloved children’s songs, lullabies, and prayers from her native Armenia on November 22.
- On November 22, the Armenian-Canadian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian gives new life to beloved children’s songs, lullabies, and prayers that have been passed down generation after generation from her homeland, accompanied by
- VOCES8 , the GRAMMY-nominated a cappella octet, return to Koerner Hall to help celebrate the holidays on December 21.
- Chanticleer, the GRAMMY Award-winning vocal ensemble return to Toronto on March 1 with a program of a cappella choral music that range from the Renaissance masterworks to spirituals.
String and Chamber Music Concerts
- Kyung Wha Chung with Kevin Kenner, piano, perform works by Debussy, Schubert, Schoenberg, and Franck on November 9.
- Ray Chen with Julio Elizalde perform Bach, Bazzini, Beethoven, Dvořák, Saint-Saëns, as well as Chick Corea on November 19. Chen performs on the 1715 “Joachim” Stradivarius violin, once owned by the famed Hungarian violinist, Joseph Joachim.
- An Evening with Nicola Benedetti spotlights the Grammy Award-winning Scottish violinist on February 4 in a concert of works by Bloch, Ponce, Paganini, Sarasate, and others, including new commissions and arrangements of traditional Scottish music arranged for violin, guitar, and accordion.
- Luka Coetzee with Jon Kimura Parker perform works from Omar Daniel and George Gershwin to Brahms and Rachmaninov on February 20. Coetzee is a super talented RCM alumni who made her professional debut at age 11.
- Danish String Quartet, made up of three Danes and one Norwegian, return to Koerner Hall on February 28 to perform a program that ranges from Ravel’s String Quartet to Jonny Greenwood’s Suite for String Quartet from the film There Will Be Blood.
- Lisa Batiashvili with Giorgi Gigashvili perform works by Beethoven, Bartók, Franck, and fellow Georgian Ioseb Bardanashvili on May 24.
- Hilary Hahn with Tom Poster, in a long awaited return by the superstar violinist, perform works by Lili Boulanger, Debussy, Fauré, and Ravel, as well as Bun-Ching Lam and a North American premiere by Scott Tixier on May 21. Three-time Grammy Award-winning violinist Hilary Hahn is currently artist-in-residence at both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and London’s Wigmore Hall.
And More…
James Anagnoson, Dean of The Glenn Gould School, comments, “The Glenn Gould School will once again present an array of talent in performances of the Royal Conservatory Orchestra, the Glenn Gould School Opera, the Mazzoleni Masters Series, the Discovery Series, The Phil and Eli Taylor Performance Academy for Young Artists, and The Rebanks Family Fellowship Concert series — which feature the students, faculty, and friends of The Glenn Gould School.”
The Royal Conservatory Orchestra will be conducted by JoAnn Falletta, Mei-Ann Chen, Peter Oundjian, and Earl Lee during the season.
The Glenn Gould School Operas include Menotti’s The Telephone and Canadian composer Dean Burry’s Baby Kintyre, presented by students from The Glenn Gould School’s vocal program on November 7 and 8, conducted by Jennifer Tung and directed by Liza Balkan.
For the GGS Spring Opera: Serenata Italiana on March 18 and 20, the artists of The Glenn Gould School’s vocal program and the Royal Conservatory Orchestra present an Italian comedic double bill of Rossini’s La cambiale di matrimonio and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, conducted by Gordon Gerrard and directed by Robert McQueen.
Along with Koerner Hall, some RCM concert series take place in Mazzoleni Concert Hall and Temerty Theatre, and there are other series (jazz, world music), we just couldn’t fit in this list.
- Find full concert details, subscriptions and tickets [HERE].
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