The NAC Orchestra is delighted to collaborate with guest conductor Lina Gonzalez-Granados in her National Arts Centre conducting debut. This brilliant Colombian-American artist is winner of the 2021 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and founder and artistic director of Unitas Ensemble. Her flair for both opera and orchestral repertoire has earned Gonzalez-Granados international recognition. 

We also welcome pianist and long-time friend of the Orchestra Jan Lisiecki back to Southam Hall to perform Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3. “My journey with Beethoven’s music started, perhaps most concretely, with the third piano concerto, which I remember playing from a young age. It starts with this darkness and this emotion, and of course it goes out of bounds a lot, but it is somehow firmly planted,” says Lisiecki of this beautiful concerto. 

Jessica Hunt’s Climb, commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, is an aural exploration of her physical experiences with disability and chronic illness, a fearful but exciting journey that is both haunting and hopeful. NACO is very proud to give the Canadian premiere of Climb and to welcome a brilliant voice for art and inclusion to our stage.  

To listen to Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, From the New World, is to lose yourself in a joyful cloud of music that is not only classic but also eternal. Written by the great composer while he was director of the National Conservatory of Music of America (1892–1895), From the New World is understandably one of the most beloved symphonies of all time—so much so that Neil Armstrong took a tape recording of it on the Apollo 11 mission that first landed man on the moon.