A guide to Greater Boston's winter wonderland of classical music

Tired of cold, dank, or slushy winter weather? Or winter weather that’s too warm? If so, nothing could be more cheering or enlivening than an afternoon or evening of live music. The list below is just some of this winter’s classical events I’d be happy to exchange for sitting home with a stiff drink or a murder mystery. Hope I see you at one — or more — of them.

And one thing more to remember: there are concerts (often free, often first rate) at the Boston area’s numerous schools and conservatories. And if you have a favorite individual or group that I might not be aware of, please let me know.

Now that Holiday Pops is over, the BSO will be back in full swing (beginning Jan. 11), with a program that includes BSO music director Andris Nelsons leading Stravinsky’s overwhelming “The Rite of Spring” (though the dullest performance of this I ever heard was one conducted by Nelsons). But the BSO concerts I’m most eager to hear are the two performances that might well be the high point of Nelsons’s much applauded Shostakovich cycle: the Russian composer’s ferocious 1934 opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” With a libretto co-authored by Shostakovich himself, this opera was an international sensation that was quickly banned by Joseph Stalin, who preferred more upbeat and patriotic works for the post-war Soviet era. The glamorous Latvian soprano (and Nelsons’s ex-wife) Kristine Opolais returns to the BSO as the adulterous and murderous title character. As a singer, she has major limitations, but this role might suit both her voice and temperament. The large cast includes many local singers in featured roles (Jan. 25 and 27).

The BSO offers concerts almost every weekend through the winter. There are especially appealing programs led by visiting conductors that are not exclusively devoted to concert music. In addition to the Shostakovich opera will be concert performances of Bartok’s only opera, the eerie “Bluebeard’s Castle,” with German bass-baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle in the sinister title role and Scottish mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill as his latest wife, conducted by Karina Canellakis (Feb. 8-10), and a staged adaptation by Bill Barclay of Ibsen’s play “Peer Gynt,” with Dima Slobodeniouk leading Grieg’s famous incidental music (March 7-9).

Legendary Boston music director Benjamin Zander, on the verge of his 85th birthday, has put together a perfectly constructed program featuring Mahler, the composer for whom he’s most admired (Feb. 24). Zander begins with Ravel’s brief and touching yet anti-sentimental “Pavane for a Dead Princess” and Berg’s heartbreaking Violin Concerto, dedicated to “the memory of an angel” (the 21-year-old Manon Gropius), with (for the right reasons) the highly praised Dutch violinist Liza Ferschtman. This all leading us into Mahler’s autobiographical First Symphony, perhaps the greatest and most kaleidoscopic first symphony in the classical repertoire.

Zander returns to Symphony Hall with his amazing Boston Philharmonic Youth Symphony Orchestra in a program that contrasts Benjamin Britten’s roiling “Four Sea Interludes” from his opera “Peter Grimes” with Charles Ives’s haunting “Three Places in New England” (March 3). These will share a program with more familiar repertory: the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, with Ukrainian pianist Anna Fedorova, and Ravel’s maybe too gorgeous “Daphnis and Chloe” Suite No. 2.

Under new music director Tianhui Ng and admired concertmaster Danielle Maddon, NEP offers “New Music New England,” with music reaching as far back as Charles Ives’s 1935 “Three Places in New England” — unusual to have two performances of this in one season, let alone on the same date (see the Boston Philharmonic Youth Symphony Orchestra above — along with more recent work: Wang Lu’s “Surge,” David Sanford’s “Thy Book of Toil,” Kati Agócs’ “Perpetual Summer,” and best of all, John Harbison’s “What Do We Make of Bach?” with organist Paul Jacobs.

Steven Lipsitt’s BB&B presents star marimbist Mika Stoltzman and her celebrated clarinetist husband Robert Stoltzman, together in Astor Piazzolla’s Bach-inspired “Fuga y misterio” and individually in Mika’s own marimba transcription of Bach’s overwhelming violin Chaconne, and Richard in a newly commissioned transcription for clarinet and string orchestra of Leonard Bernstein’s Clarinet Sonata. Keeping to what he calls the “Bach/Latin theme,” Lipsitt writes, he’ll also conduct Teresa Carreño’s “Little Waltz” and Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 9.

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Countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo is one of those rare creatures: a serious artist with a spirit of both adventure and fun. The Celebrity Series of Boston brings him back in a program that features a range of the work he’s best known for — challenging Baroque (Vivaldi) and contemporary music (Gabriela Lena Frank and Joel Thompson) — along with some fascinating surprises: Verdi art songs and the “Ave Maria” from “Otello” followed by a selection of songs famously recorded by Barbra Streisand (“My Man,” “Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long,” “Happy Days Are Here Again”). One happy day will surely be here again.

Our beloved American diva had to postpone her eagerly awaited Celebrity Series of Boston November concert with Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan. Sharing the title “The Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene” with Fleming’s 2022 Grammy-winning album, the program will focus on 19th-century composers who celebrate nature and contemporary composers who deal with what threatens it.

The Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson made a big impression with his 2022 Celebrity Series recital. Now he’s back with one of the monuments of classical music, Bach’s daunting and delightful “Goldberg Variations,” one of the supreme tests for a keyboard artist and — if done with the right sensitivity and élan — one of the great joys for a classical music audience. The New York Times picked Ólafsson’s “Goldberg” recording as one of the best recordings of the year.

Founded in 1975, this renowned string quartet has only one of its original players still performing, cellist András Fejér, but Edward Dusinberre took over the first violin slot  30 years ago, so his warmth and expressivity is the sound we now associate with the Takács. The quartet is back with a wonderful program for Celebrity Series: Haydn’s great “Sunrise” Quartet, the second and perhaps least played of Beethoven’s magnificent three “Razumovsky” quartets, and a new work, “flow,” by violist/composer Nokuthula Ngwenyama, co-commissioned by Celebrity Series. If you’re not able to make the in-person performance, there is a streaming option available Feb. 18-24.

What more do you need than just that name? The six-time Tony Award recipient is one of the great Broadway stars, a luminous singer and devastating actress. Many thanks to the Celebrity Series of Boston for bringing her back. (This concert was postponed from last October when McDonald got ill.)

The distinguished British pianist/composer Sir Stephen Hough makes a rare New England appearance for a winter program at Rockport Music, along with the Castalian Quartet, the quartet in residence at Oxford University. The Castalians will play Haydn’s marvelous Quartet in A major, Op. 20, No. 6, and Hough’s String Quartet No. 1, “Les Six Rencontres,” and Hough will join them for one of the greatest of chamber pieces, the Brahms Piano Quintet.

CCMS has invited the world renown piano virtuoso Yefim Bronfman for a solo recital at what I’m told is a marvelous new concert venue. His program consists of large-scale romantic works by Schubert (the A-minor Sonata) and Chopin (Sonata No. 3) and Schumann’s rarely heard “Faschingsschwank aus Wien” (Carnival Scenes from Vienna).

It’s a particular treat to hear French music played by a French orchestra. The young Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, who is also music director of the Oslo Philharmonic, leads one of the Frenchest of orchestras in one of the Frenchest of all orchestral works, Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” along with two works (by Russian composers) that had their premieres in Paris: Stravinsky’s dazzling “Firebird,” his first major ballet for the Ballets Russes, and Prokofiev’s brilliant Second Piano Concerto, with Yunchan Lim — the youngest winner ever of the Cliburn Piano Competition. Both conductor and soloist are making their Celebrity Series debuts. Maybe spring will start a few days early this year.

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Conductor Federico Cortese has acquired a reputation for leading some of Boston’s most outstanding opera performances, especially Italian opera, even with a student orchestra. He has tapped excellent singers and has found an expert collaborator in stage director Joshua Major. This year’s opera is Bellini’s “Norma,” perhaps the greatest of the early 19th-century bel canto operas — the tragic story of a Druid priestess and her betrayal by her illicit lover and her acolyte. It was one of soprano Maria Callas’ most sublime roles and places the greatest vocal and emotional demands on any soprano who attempts it. I’m not familiar with this year’s cast (soprano Serena Farnocchia, tenor Dominick Chenes, mezzo-soprano Ashley Dixon), but maestro Cortese’s record of excellence makes me optimistic about the prospects.

The small-scale but feisty Boston Opera Collaborative presents “Room & Board & Opera,” a comic opera pop-up at Boston’s Room & Board showroom. The two works on the program are Jonathan Bailey Holland’s “Naomi in the Living Room” (ideal for a furniture showroom) and Lee Hoiby’s “The Italian Lesson,” based on the famous monologue by Ruth Draper. The creative team includes stage director Patricia Maria Weinmann and music director Ken Yanagisawa. FYI: food and drink are included in the price of your ticket.

Live performances from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera are no farther away than your local movie theater or concert hall. Of course, the acoustics aren’t as good as in the opera house itself and your neighbor might be eating popcorn, but it’s cheaper than traveling to New York and sitting a mile from the stage. This winter, we’re getting new productions of two masterpieces. First, Bizet’s “Carmen,” whose staggering popularity hasn’t diminished its staggering brilliance, with the exciting young mezzo soprano from the Russian Republic of Bashkortostan, Aigul Akhmetshina, in the iconic title role. The strong cast includes tenor Piotr Beczała, soprano Angel Blue and bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen. Then we get the first new production in 30 years of Verdi’s epic “La Forza del Destino” (The power of destiny), conducted by the Met’s music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin and starring the most exciting young soprano in the opera world today, Lise Davidsen. Eventually, you might not have to leave home at all if these are telecast on PBS. But they will be truly “live” only on the dates of the first telecast.

This seductively named young opera company, founded in 2019 by artistic director/stage director Kirsten Z. Cairns, has been offering us over the past three years what no other Boston opera company has attempted: productions of Benjamin Britten’s three so-called “church parables,” among his most important operatic works. This year, again under the musical direction of Edward Elwyn Jones, we’re getting “The Burning Fiery Furnace” — about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. The excellent cast includes Jesse Darden, Matthew DiBattista, Aaron Engebreth, Daniel Fridley, David McFerrin and Paul Soper. Streaming of this performance will be available Feb. 23-March 1.

BLO completes its current opera season with two radically different works. The first is by the 18th-century French-Caribbean composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, hero of the film “Chevalier.” It’s a farcical romantic-comedy from 1780 called “The Anonymous Lover” (a co-production with Opera Philadelphia). The second is the contemporary American composer Matthew Aucoin’s darker “Eurydice” (2020), based on a play by Sarah Ruhl (and in a new arrangement co-commissioned with Opera Grand Rapids). The composer, I’m happy to report, a superb musician, will also conduct.

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This popular and endearing chamber music collective always offers high-level playing of an impressive variety. One of Sarasa’s two winter concerts (Jan. 11, Jan. 13-14) is devoted to great French Baroque chamber music (Couperin, Jacquet de la Guerre, Mondonville, Telemann and others); the other to the folk-infused secular and sacred music from the missions of Bolivia (March 8-10). Each program will be played at venues in Cambridge, Lexington and Brattleboro, Vermont.

Prize-winning string players Stella Chen (violin), Matthew Lippman (viola) and Brannon Cho (cello) kick off the winter series for the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts with 20th-century trios for strings by Leo Weiner, Emmy Frensel Wegener and Gideon Klein, concluding with Mozart’s astounding Divertimento in E flat (Jan. 13). And the eloquent Korean American pianist Minsoo Sohn, who studied with Boston pianists Wha Kyung Byun and the late Russell Sherman, devotes an evening to Liszt’s “Consolations” and 12 phenomenally challenging “Transcendental Études” (March 8).

One of our best-loved string quartets, in longtime residence at Brandeis University, has only one concert scheduled in the Boston area this winter: Beethoven’s middle-period quartet, the tightly-woven, so-called “Serioso” Quartet in F-minor, Opus 95, will join Dvořák’s looser, more rhapsodic “Slavonic” Quartet in E-flat major, Opus 51.

Violist Marcus Thompson’s Boston Chamber Music Society offers a wide range of both music and performers. Its winter season opens with an unpredictable selection of works not often performed, such as Fauré’s late D-minor Piano Trio and Frank Bridge’s D-minor Piano Quintet (Jan. 21). Also on the program are George Tsontakis’ “Portraits by El Greco (Book 1),” a 2014 BCMS commission, and Grażyna Bacewicz’s 1937 Oboe Sonata, with the amazing Peggy Pearson. Streaming of the concert is available starting Feb. 4. (BCMS’s other winter concerts will be on Feb. 25 and March 17 at Sanders Theatre.)

Boston’s most popular conductorless chamber ensemble begins its winter concerts with an irresistible program curated by violist Sarah Darling called “Street Stories” — a musical paean to city life. In Monteverdi’s “Battle of Tancredi and Clorinda,” Darling writes, “drama ensues from the main characters simply passing each other on the street.” A Boccherini quintet (arranged for string orchestra) is subtitled “Night Music of the Streets of Madrid.” And there’s Tchaikovsky’s colorful romantic travelogue (in another arrangement) “Souvenir de Florence.” This is music, Darling writes, about “what can happen when you walk out your front door.” Two other winter programs include one called “Stonehenge,” featuring a chamber version of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony (St. John’s Church on Feb. 17,  Longy School of Music on Feb. 18), and one called “At Odds,” celebrating the concerto grosso from the 18th to the 21st century (March 1).

The proceeds from every concert in the Music for Food series go to food initiatives to feed those in need. The first program this year, in a series called “Parlando” (“speaking”), which requires both music and the spoken word, brings us one of the great but seldom-performed Haydn masterpieces, “The Seven Last Words of Christ,” for string quartet, and the world premiere of a piece for viola composed and performed by New England Conservatory students (Jan. 28). Musicians from Marlboro contribute a later concert with works by Coleridge-Taylor, Dvořák, Webern and Schoenberg’s moving “Verklärte Nacht” (“Transfigured Night”) (Feb. 18).

Conductor Emerita Gisèle Ben-Dor returns to lead the Pro Arte in a delightful “All in the Family” concert of old favorites that are also brilliant compositions — with an eye on the kids: Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” Saint-Saëns’s “Carnival of the Animals,” a Romanze by Teresa Carreño (a duet arranged here for cello and orchestra) and Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”

The first concert of the year from David Feltner’s COBis called, appropriately, “Winter Light.” The program features Carson Cooman’s “Symphony of Light” and Grieg’s enchanting “Holberg Suite” and a string orchestra arrangement of his G-minor Quartet.

Flutist Julie Scolnik’s popular group presents “Wanderlust: Souvenirs from Abroad,” which includes Tchaikovsky’s string sextet “Souvenir de Florence,” an arrangement for flute and strings of Haydn’s “London” Symphony No. 104 (his last symphony), Elizabeth Brown’s “Liguria,” and, if Italy and England are still too close to home, how about a trip around the entire world with Milhaud’s “Creation du Monde.”

For 39 years, cellist and longtime New England Conservatory president Laurence Lesser has curated a series of free Monday evening concerts at Jordan Hall, mainly including NEC faculty members. This coming winter’s concert will have a collection of Ives songs with soprano Laura Choi Stuart accompanied by Tanya Blaich, and Brahms’s heavenly first piano trio in B major, Opus 8, with pianist George Li, violinist Donald Weilerstein and Lesser himself on cello.

One of the Boston area’s most cherished and adventurous chamber groups was begun by that cherished and adventurous oboist Peggy Pearson, who still performs though she has turned over the reins to two of her most outstanding collaborators, violinist Gabriela Díaz and clarinetist Rane Moore. Winsor’s winter program, “Lineage,” traces the premiere of an as yet untitled new work by classical and hip-hop artist deVon Russell Gray back through time in a series of works by Gluck, Salieri, Reicha, Franck, Saint-Saëns, Faure, Boulanger, Copland, Bernstein and Lee Hyla. The concert will end with a new collaboration between deVon Russell Gray and the impressive students of Project STEP, a new generation in that lineage.

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This treasured early-music vocal ensemble offers an intriguing concert of “Renaissance Portraits,” which will include musical portraits of “popes and nobles, lovers and spouses, patrons and friends, and theatrical personalities including a cocky cook and a desperately self-absorbed lover.” The musical rarities will be by Ciconia, Du Fay, Busnoys, Isaac and others.

Under the new direction of Jonathan Cohen, the choral group that had its first concert only a few months after the end of the War of 1812 is opening its new season with a program called “British Baroque,” co-curated by conductor/violinist Rachel Podger and countertenor Reginald Mobley. The music, as the H+H website says, is by composers who were either British-born (Purcell), British by choice (Handel) or British by force (Ignatius Sancho, who was born enslaved but became the first Black man to vote in a British election).

Our premiere early-music concert series has three local winter concerts. Soprano Amanda Forsythe joins the group Opera Prima to give voice to lovelorn figures in 17th-century Italy, singing works by Monteverdi, Rossi, Merula, Caccini and others (Feb. 3). The quartet Le Consort (strings and harpsichord) makes its BEMF debut with “A Journey Through Baroque Europe” (Feb. 23), with music by Bach, Vivaldi, Corelli, Purcell, Rameau and others (this composer “others” must be pretty special to appear on so many programs!). And BEMF music directors Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs bring us “A Garden of Earthly Delights,” the modern premiere of a series of 17th-century composer/priest Marco Marazzoli’s short cantatas on a wide range of subjects from the tranquility of a papal retreat to an allegory of war and peace (March 2).

This early music chamber group with the delightful name will for a moment be the dance orchestra for the annual Harvard Square English Country Dance, in which this small group playing many instruments provide music for a wide and wild variety of terpsichore. Participation is not only requested but demanded! (Don’t worry. There will be a “caller” to teach the dances.)

In the process of gearing up for its ambitious staged version of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” in the spring, Martin Pearlman’s Boston Baroque, “North America’s first permanent Baroque Orchestra” now in its 50th year, is returning to the familiar delights of Vivaldi’s "The Four Seasons," featuring violinist Christina Day Martinson. The rest of the program has less familiar goodies: a Geminiani Concerto Grosso and a relatively little known Handel motet, “Silete Venti” (“Be silent, winds”), with endearing soprano Amanda Forsythe. (The March 16 concert at GBH’s Calderwood Studio will be livestreamed and available to watch on-demand for 30 days.)

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It’s hard to believe that our senior contemporary music group is celebrating its 51st anniversary. Under music director David Hoose, Collage New Music’s winter concert includes newly commissioned works by Texu Kim (“Ominous Omnibus” — the piece with the most delightful title) and Dorothy Chang, with other recent pieces by Jonathan Bailey Holland, the great Fred Lerdahl, David Sanford and Ann Callaway (a Boston premiere of “Devachan”).

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Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the instrument Sarah Darling plays. We regret the error.