Performances + Events
New England Conservatory’s 2025–2026 concert season will celebrate milestones that reflect not only a history of artistic excellence but a continued dedication to musical innovation. Last year, NEC recognized the legacy of the beloved First Monday at Jordan Hall chamber-music series, which for decades has introduced audiences to some of the field’s most captivating artists in performances of new and familiar repertoire.
Faculty cellist Laurence Lesser, who established the series in 1985 and served as its Artistic Director for 40 years, was honored at the Conservatory’s Commencement in May for this immeasurable contribution to the community. Lesser will continue his relationship with the series, and with audiences in Jordan Hall, as First Monday’s Founder and Artistic Advisor.
In the season to come, the series’s new Artistic Co-Chairs, violist Nicholas Cords, violinist Soovin Kim, and pianist HaeSun Paik, will continue, with Lesser’s support and encouragement, and in collaboration with departments across the Conservatory, the tradition of bringing together faculty, alumni, students, and guest artists for sublime and memorable concerts that are free and open to the community, and streamed live for audiences around the world.
“Each of them has something different to bring [to the series],” Lesser said. “They know very much what I believe in, and at the same time, they have to spread their own wings.”
Laurence Lesser
“It’s a renewing of the same spirit and a continuation of this series that’s been going on for 40 years, and reaching new alumni and trying to reach the community at an even deeper level,” Cords said of the new artistic-leadership structure. It’s a new opportunity, Paik said, “to build camaraderie among the NEC community.”
“The strong interpersonal bonds and the collective passion for music among the students, faculty, and staff are what make NEC such a vibrant school,” Kim said. “Our programming will espouse these qualities and carry forward the musical depth that Larry Lesser instilled at NEC.”
The 2025–2026 First Monday season takes its thematic cue from the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which the country will mark on July 4. “The idea of various forms of musical freedom,” Cords said, will serve as “a kind of banner for the season.” That notion will be reflected in an observance of György Kurtag’s 100 birthday, a performance of Richard Strauss’s wartime lament, Metamorphosen, and other programmatic elements, both thematically explicit and not.
The season opens in October with a concert honoring Lesser and observing, in the series’s tradition of acknowledging significant moments in music history, the 50th anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich’s death in August 1975. The program will feature performances of the composer’s Piano Quintet, the recently deceased Sofia Gubaidulina’s Dancer on a Tightrope, Jules Massenet’s Élégie, Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello — which Lesser performed with violinist Arnold Steinhardt on an early First Monday program — and more.
The First Monday concert in November will celebrate Gunther Schuller’s legacy at NEC with a rare performance of his Bass Quartet on a program that also includes Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet. NEC will continue its celebration of Schuller’s legacy, which includes his leadership of the Conservatory from 1967 to 1977 and the ethos that remains, with a weeklong festival titled Jumpin’ in the Future: The Legacy of Gunther Schuller, from November 17 to November 21. Schuller, who died in 2015, would’ve been 100 on November 22.
In December, the First Monday concert will celebrate Boston’s baroque music community with a performance of Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw’s Harpsichord Concerto, as well as Schuller’s arrangement of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, in further acknowledgment of Schuller’s immeasurable contributions to the NEC community and beyond.
Overall, Cords, Paik, and Kim aspire to continue broadening connections across and beyond the Conservatory, and to engage “a sense of curiosity around different ways of making music and different musical forms, which is something that is so strong at NEC and is such a legacy for NEC,” Cords said.
“A chance to play chamber music in Jordan Hall is a privilege,” Lesser said. “I think the new group, in that spirit, is the right mix of different talents.”
“I am thrilled that Nicholas, Soovin, and HaeSun will lead First Monday into the future,” NEC President Andrea Kalyn said. “The programs we will experience under this new artistic leadership, in collaboration with the series’s esteemed founder, Laurence Lesser, continue a legacy of artistic excellence that inspires us all.”
