The Latino experience will be a focus of Carnegie Hall’s coming season, the presenter’s leadership announced on Wednesday, with a festival inside and beyond the hall’s walls called “Nuestros Sonidos” (“Our Sounds”) and a slate of concerts featuring artists with ties to Latin America.
Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview that the festival was meant to respond to the underrepresentation of Latino people and Hispanic culture in American classical music.
“We thought,” he said, “we ought to make sure we address that balance.”
Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar conductor who was born in Venezuela, will open both the 2024-25 season and the festival in October, by leading his Los Angeles Philharmonic in three concerts. He will have a growing presence in New York next season: Aside from his Carnegie appearances, he will lead several weeks of programming with the New York Philharmonic, where he takes over as music and artistic director in 2026.
The Mexican-born composer Gabriela Ortiz will be in residence at Carnegie all season. Five of her works, including a concerto she wrote for the cellist Alisa Weilerstein, will have their New York premieres.
Carnegie’s season lineup — about 170 performances — will also feature the pianists Lang Lang and Mitsuko Uchida, the violinist Maxim Vengerov and the vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, who will each organize a series of Perspectives concerts.
Here are 12 highlights from the season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ
Mitsuko Uchida and Musicians From Marlboro, Nov. 12
The peerlessly subtle pianist Mitsuko Uchida is a Carnegie favorite, and this season is the last in her three-year Perspectives series. Among solo and orchestral appearances, she’ll perform with young musicians from Marlboro Music, where she is an artistic director. With them at Zankel Hall, she’ll glory in Romanticism (Schumann’s Piano Quartet) and Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E flat (Op. 70, No. 2). She’ll also revel in some of the mercurial modernism of Gyorgy Kurtag, a composer she has long championed. SETH COLTER WALLS
Berlin Philharmonic, Nov. 17-19
This orchestra and its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, offer a master class in stupefying technique and passion. After giving Korngold’s only symphony a rare outing at Carnegie in 2022, they’ll play his better known Violin Concerto with Hilary Hahn, as well as Rachmaninoff’s brooding “Isle of the Dead,” Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony and, for Bruckner’s 200th birthday, his grandly sprawling Fifth, a rare foray into his music for Petrenko. ZACHARY WOOLFE
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Nov. 22-23
Klaus Mäkelä doesn’t officially take the podium of this storied ensemble until 2027, but he has already appeared with it frequently over the past two seasons as its artistic partner. These dates will be their first New York appearance together since his appointment, with other enticements in the local premiere of a new work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Reid and the excellent violinist Lisa Batiashvili as the soloist in Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto. JOSHUA BARONE
Czech Philharmonic, Dec. 3-5
It’s a dubious belief that being from a specific country makes an orchestra particularly well-suited to play that nation’s music. But recently, that has been the case with the Czech Philharmonic under its chief conductor, Semyon Bychkov. Featuring star soloists in Yo-Yo Ma, Daniil Trifonov and more, this series offers an opportunity to hear great Czech music by Dvorak, Smetana and Janacek — who will be represented by a rare performance of his “Glagolitic Mass.” JOSHUA BARONE
Janine Jansen and Denis Kozhukhin, Dec. 10
Janine Jansen, an elegant and radiantly modest Dutch violinist, has long been troubled by injuries and her career centers on Europe, so her New York appearances should be treasured — including this recital, her first at Carnegie since 2018. Joined by the pianist Denis Kozhukhin, she will play works by Brahms and Clara and Robert Schumann. On March 5, she will also join the London Symphony Orchestra and Antonio Pappano for Bernstein’s “Serenade (After Plato’s Symposium).” ZACHARY WOOLFE
Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Jan. 23
The French conductor Raphaël Pichon creates highly imaginative programs for concerts and recordings, shaping them into emotive, musically cogent performances. For his Carnegie Hall debut, he leads the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in a re-creation of his spellbinding album “Mein Traum,” which sustains an atmosphere of caliginous beauty in a loosely plotted drama fashioned from works by Schubert, Schumann and Weber. The baritone Christian Gerhaher and the soprano Ying Fang are the vocal soloists. OUSSAMA ZAHR
International Contemporary Ensemble, Jan. 30
The program “Boulez Rebooted” looks to be the highlight of Carnegie’s centennial celebration of Pierre Boulez, the firebrand composer, conductor and pioneer of computer music. The International Contemporary Ensemble will present “Anthèmes 2,” a sizzling work for violin and live electronics, as well as pieces by Kaija Saariaho and Tyshawn Sorey and a new work inspired by Boulez, “IRCAM Variations,” named after the experimental music institution he founded in the 1970s. SETH COLTER WALLS
Yuja Wang and Vikingur Olafsson, Feb. 19
For a lover of piano music, this pairing of two keyboard virtuosos in their prime is dreamy, intriguing and, actually, completely logical. Each has a brand of cool perfection — Wang’s playing burns with a cold fire, and Olafsson’s is elegantly intellectual — that suits the precision required for four-hands repertoire. They will perform Schubert’s soulful Fantasie in F minor (D. 940) and Rachmaninoff’s arrangement of his “Symphonic Dances.” OUSSAMA ZAHR
Cleveland Orchestra, March 18
The Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian possesses a voice of black steel that can withstand the intense lyricism of her singing. She performs Strauss’s exquisite “Four Last Songs” and the final scene from Puccini’s “Suor Angelica” with the Cleveland Orchestra, under its music director, Franz Welser-Möst. She will also appear at Zankel Hall with the pianist Lukas Geniusas on Dec. 17, delving into Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff songs, more intoxicating works in a late-Romantic vein. OUSSAMA ZAHR
Attacca Quartet, May 1
Next season will be a good time for fans of — and newcomers to — Gabriela Ortiz, whose works dot the Carnegie calendar from beginning to end. There will be a mixture of old and new in the Attacca Quartet’s appearance at Zankel Hall, which includes Ortiz’s immense “Altar de Muertos” (1997) and a to-be-titled world premiere, as well as the cellist-composer Paul Wiancko’s “Lift” (2016), sure to be thrilling in these players’ lively hands. JOSHUA BARONE
Nina Stemme and Roland Pontinen, May 2
Nina Stemme, who has reigned for years among the world’s leading dramatic sopranos, was a memorably powerful Salome at Carnegie in 2012, but has never had a solo recital there. She and the pianist Roland Pontinen are stuffing her debut with memorable repertoire: Elgar’s “Sea Pictures,” Wagner’s “Wesendonck Lieder” and the “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde” — as well as, perhaps most intriguing, songs by Kurt Weill. Immolation Scene encore, anyone? ZACHARY WOOLFE
Cécile McLorin Salvant: ‘Ogresse,’ May 21
The synopsis for “Ogresse” is spare: “She falls in love. She eats the guy. She dies.” Yet Cécile McLorin Salvant’s skill as a composer and singer is anything but compact. Her jazz-meets-chamber-music song cycle premiered in 2018, and for anyone who missed it, sweet relief comes with this revival on the closing night of Salvant’s Perspectives series. Darcy James Argue, an arranger on the project and a regular collaborator of Salvant’s, conducts. SETH COLTER WALLS