The word “festival” derives from the Latin word for a religious ceremony and morphed into words having more to do with eating (“feast”) and simply having a good time — all of which make sense when it comes to summer classical music festivals. Here are the ones that are within a plausible drive from Boston, including a few recommendations of events that sound especially worth making the effort.
MASSACHUSETTS
Rockport | Through July 12
Rockport is closer to Boston than Lenox, and although it doesn’t have as many star performers as Tanglewood, it has a few and is also admirable in introducing — and bringing back — some appealing younger international musicians to the Shalin Liu Performance Center. A fine musician himself, Rockport artistic director and violist Barry Shiffman happily takes part in some of them. Here are just a few of the concerts that stand out for me.
I’ve never heard Poiesis, the young string quartet that won the Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2025, but their Rockport program is so intriguing in its choice of masterpieces (Haydn) and new voices (Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate), that they make me want to hear them (June 27). And the superb violinist Augustin Hadelich, who has been artist-in-residence with the BSO, you want to hear under any circumstances. He’s giving a solo recital featuring works by Telemann, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Ysaÿe and Paganini, and then joined by violinist Jennifer Frautschi, violists Hsin-Yun Huang and Rockport director Barry Shiffman, and cellists James Baik and Adrian Fung in Tchaikovsky’s long but delicious dessert “Souvenir de Florence” (June 28).
After the actual festival is over, there are still goodies in store — a kind of celebrity series of musicians you can’t live without. For example, the two-piano concert with two pianists with almost the same surname but not related except in friendship and phenomenal skill (and were both born in Canada: Marc-André Hamelin and Charles Richard-Hamelin. They’ll be playing Mozart’s exquisite Sonata for Two Pianos, Percy Grainger’s two-piano arrangement of Gershwin in his Fantasy on “Porgy and Bess,” along with music by Chaminade, Medtner and Chopin (Aug. 16). And the great Audra MacDonald comes to Rockport on Aug. 20, but what makes this event so appealing, the rare intimacy of the theater, is exactly why you can’t go, because it’s already sold out. If you’re desperate for a ticket, keep trying. You never know what might suddenly open up.
Lenox | July 5-Aug. 23
The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer season in the Berkshires fits all the definitions of festival. There’s feasting on the lawn (BYO or buy it there), the mood is festive (inspired not only by the outstanding playing by one of the world’s great orchestras but by the magnificent views from the beautiful grounds). And people from Boston and New York and from even farther away return every year as if to a religious ritual. On the weekends, unlike in Boston, there’s a different program every day, so it’s a great place to stay for a whole weekend or longer!
Among the surfeit of concerts, here are a few that seem particularly tempting. Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen returns in a program I’d really like to hear him conduct: Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod, Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony, and Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with celebrated piano virtuoso Yefim Bronfman (July 31). Probably the most ambitious event of the season is a semi-staged performance of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” with Andris Nelsons (not my first choice for a Mozart conductor) leading a cast of rising young stars with some admirable old-timers in age-appropriate comedic roles (Susan Graham as Figaro’s mother) (Aug. 1). The forever young Yo-Yo Ma will be around for four performances and an open rehearsal. I most want to hear him in soulful partnership with violinist Renaud Capuçon in the Brahms Double Concerto (Aug. 7), though I’m guessing that he himself might be most interested in the concert he has curated and will be participating in featuring the BSO cello section in music for multiple cellos (Aug. 9).
Salonen will also be the curator of this year’s Festival of Contemporary Music, maybe the most important Tanglewood concerts of the summer, in which mostly Tanglewood fellows perform a series of free concerts, which this year are in programs with self-explanatory titles: “Those We Have Lost Too Soon” (Saariaho, Stucky, Knussen), “Meta-Music: Music about Other Music,” “The Next Generation,” “Nordic Boomers” (which includes Salonen conducting his own Cello Concerto), and “Gen Z Compared with Iconic Works” (Seiji Ozawa Hall and Linde Center Studio E, July 23-27).
The BSO website for the 2026-2027 season seems a mild attempt to honor the departure (after the Tanglewood 2027 season) of maestro Nelsons, with a webpage listing all of his performances next season under the heading “Celebrating Maestro Andris Nelsons.” The opening fundraising gala is still technically summer, but there isn’t much information yet except that Nelsons will be conducting, the special guest will be Yo-Yo Ma, and there will be a pre-concert dinner and an after-concert reception (Symphony Hall, Sept. 17).
Waltham & Great Barrington | July 10-Aug. 8
The 53rd season of violinist Daniel Stepner’s Aston Magna Summer Festival consists, as always, of four programs, each performed once near Boston and once in the Berkshires. So if you are stuck in the big city this summer, it’s just a little schlep out to Brandeis University in Waltham or if you happen to be at Tanglewood, it’s an easy drive to Great Barrington. And either way, it’s worth the effort. The first concert would be my first choice: “The Genius of the French Baroque: Sonatas and Cantatas of Rameau, Clerambault, and others” not only because I particularly admire Rameau but because Stepner, viola da gambist Laura Jeppesen and harpsichordist Michael Sponseller will be joined by the extraordinary soprano Dominique Labelle making one of her rare return visits to Massachusetts from her home in Canada (July 16 and 18). This opening concert might easily make you want to return for the rest.
Various locations | July 31-Aug. 18
The directors of this consistently impressive and imaginative festival, Jon Menasse (clarinet) and Jon Nakamatsu (piano), have what looks like an outstanding series around the Cape, from Falmouth and Chatham to Wellfleet. This summer includes jazz as well as classical, in various intriguing combinations. But what I love most about it is the annual return of one of my favorite string quartets, the profound and probing Borromeo String Quartet — violinists Nicholas Kitchen (the founder and mind of the quartet) and Kristopher Tong, violist Melissa Reardon, and perhaps the soul of the quartet, cellist Yeesun Kim. They are scheduled for two identical concerts, in Hyannis Aug. 6 and Wellfleet Aug. 7, which will include one of Beethoven’s most gorgeous quartets, and one of the great breakthrough works in the history of the string quartet, Opus 59, No. 1 (the so-called “First Razumovsky”) and Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 14.
North Adams | July 30-Aug. 1
Not for the faint of heart, the popular contemporary music group Bang on a Can will be back for its annual LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA, the culmination of the three-week residency for “innovative composers and performers selected from an international roster of artists.” We are alerted that the programming is “fluid” and “subject to change.” So at the moment, there are no particular dates indicated — just a list of works and performers, both of which are impressive and challenging, and are likely also to be moving and fun. Among the highlights are a complete new arrangement of Philip Glass’s album “Glassworks” and a new live arrangement of Terry Riley’s important “A Rainbow in Curved Air.” Among the more or less familiar composers and musicians, we’ll find pianist Conrad Tao playing Frederic Rzewski; Eliza Bagg and Mantra Percussion in the premiere of Annie Gosfield’s one-act chamber opera about Emma Goldman, called “Emma”; Morton Feldman’s “Piano and String Quartet”; Michael Gordon’s “8,” a piece for eight cellists and “special guests”; and more, including world premieres by the composition fellows.
Great Barrington | Aug. 22, 25 & 28
Aside from the BSO’s semi-staged “Marriage of Figaro,” there isn’t a lot of opera in Massachusetts this summer. But you can count on the Berkshire Opera for at least one exciting event, staged at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center. This summer, it’s Donizetti’s most famous masterpiece, “Lucia di Lammermoor.” More than anything else, “Lucia” needs a great Lucia — a soprano who can sing impossible coloratura and who can also act, and a first-rate tenor who can’t let himself disappear after Lucia’s vocal fireworks (in the Met production with Joan Sutherland decades ago, the tenor rolled himself down a huge flight of stairs to get out attention after the famous “Mad Scene”). I’m not familiar with either the soprano, Christine Lyons (she’s pretty impressive on YouTube), or tenor Terrence Chin-Loy, but I trust the company’s co-founders, conductor and artistic director Brian Garman and stage director and director of production Jonathan Loy.
Boston | June 20-Aug. 12
Boston’s popular community orchestra, mostly under the direction of Christopher Wilkins, offers free concerts around the city and especially at the Hatch Shell. The most exciting program is surely the rare outdoor performance of Verdi’s soul-stirring “Requiem,” conducted by the Cantata Singers’ Noah Horn. The vocal soloists are soprano Felicia Moore, mezzo-soprano Erica Brookhyser, tenor Jonghyun Park and veteran bass-baritone Donnie Ray Albert (Aug. 5).
NEW YORK
Saratoga Springs | June 21-28
This summer’s Opera Saratoga selections are a bit more familiar than last year’s unusually fresh choices. The opera is Donizetti’s comedy, “L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love),” best known for its tenor aria “Una furtiva lagrima” (a Pavarotti signature piece), here sung by Wooyoung Yoon. The Broadway show is “My Fair Lady,” which I would probably never recommend without seeing first, but it has, returning as Eliza Doolittle after last year’s “She Loves Me,” an exciting soprano I’ve seen only on YouTube, Christine Taylor Price, who can sing lovely high soprano and also belt out a showstopper (Barbara Cook crossed with Barbra Streisand?).
Annandale on Hudson | June 25-Aug. 16
This summer festival at Bard College, in upstate New York, is mainly the brainchild of conductor/Bard College president Leon Botstein and is probably the most ambitious summer festival in the Northeast, if not the entire country. It offers a major opera production (usually a real rarity), concerts, dance, lectures and other ancillary events, most of them taking place in one of Frank Ghery’s major concert halls. This summer, the opera is a rarely produced work by a major composer and his major librettist: Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Die ägyptische Helena (The Egyptian Helen),” an imaginative — even bizarre — take on post-“Iliad” mythology. Botstein conducts soprano Hailey Clark (Helena) and tenor John Matthew Myers (Menelaus). And this year’s composer-under-a-microscope will be an 11-part series on Mozart!
Saratoga Springs | July 8-Aug. 22
The Saratoga Performing Arts Center is a large open-air theater in a beautiful state park just outside Saratoga Springs, New York — about an hour-and-a-half drive from Tanglewood. It’s the summer home of the New York City Ballet, The Philadelphia Orchestra, The New York Chamber Music Ensemble, plus various guest stars and rock music giants. If you’ve never seen George Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” or heard all the heavenly music by Mendelssohn that Balanchine added to the famous Overture and Wedding Music, you now have your chance. I’m also eager to see the new ballet by NYCB star Tiler Peck to Lalo’s “Symphonie Espagnole,” on a program with Balanchine’s iconic “Serenade” (Tchaikovsky) and Jerome Robbins’s “Opus 19” (Prokofiev). At NYCB, the music is as important as the dancing (July 8-11).
The Philadelphia Orchestra refers to its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, mainly on a first-name basis. Of the 13 Philadelphia Orchestra performances at SPAC, the only one conducted by Yannick is a program beginning with William Grant Still’s “Wood Notes” and concluding with the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, with an impressive vocal ensemble of four celebrated and award-winning singers: soprano Leah Hawkins, mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges, tenor Issachah Savage and bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green (Aug. 15).
The highlight of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center visit may be the performance by the young and gifted Calidore String Quartet — an afternoon of music ranging from top-drawer Haydn and Mozart to jazzy Winton Marsalis (July 26).
Cooperstown | July 10-Aug. 17
Cooperstown, New York, is a long ride from Boston, but the Glimmerglass Festival has the most operas crammed into its five-week run, combining popular and unusual operas and at least one Broadway show. This summer, the Glimmerglass season starts with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” (if you’ve seen “Blue Moon,” you know just what Richard Rodgers’s ex-partner Lorenz Hart thought of it). Among the rest of the productions, one especially stands out, but unfortunately all three performances of it are sold out. It’s a rare production of Kurt Weil, Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann’s sourly satirical “Happy End,” which has a handful of their greatest musical numbers. This new production has been on a successful tour of New York and Massachusetts, so maybe there’s a chance of it turning up someday closer to home. Or else an opera company with good sense will see the demand and want to do a new production. (Are you listening, Boston Lyric or Odyssey Opera?)
NEW HAMPSHIRE
Various locations | June 21-Aug. 15
Surely the best bargain in classical music within two hours from Boston or south of the Canadian border: Monadnock Music, directed by cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer, offers free programs of classical music all over the Granite State. For example, the season gets off to an excellent start at the beautiful Harrisville Community Church with Popper-Keizer, violinists Angelia Cho and Matthew Vera, and violists Yeh-Chun Lin and William Sotiriou for an afternoon including a Norwegian folk song arranged by the Danish String Quartet, Mozart’s soulful D-minor Quartet, K. 421, and Brahms’s late G-major string quintet. The title of this concert: “Inextinguishable Joy” (June 21).
Various locations | July 7-30
Like Monadnock Music of the 1980s and ‘90s, the New Hampshire Music Festival offers both chamber music and orchestral concerts. This summer, I’m favoring the chamber music, especially the chamber concert, in Plymouth (July 14) called “Paris in the Air.” The delightful program ranges from Martinů’s comic ballet “La Revue de Cuisine” and Marie Clémence de Grandval’s Grand Trio for Piano, Oboe, and Bassoon to Bill Marx’s “Friends” (for piano and harp) and, surely the highlight, Mozart’s wonderful Quintet for Piano and Winds. Both the Martinů and the Mozart feature one of my favorite pianists, Leslie Amper.
Putney | July 10-Aug. 10
A major point of the Yellow Barn Festival is that we don’t know in advance what all of the music will be, since much of it will be the (mostly) young professional musicians in residence. The public, of course, is invited, and every summer, there’s a week in which a distinguished composer is part of the mix. This year, it’s the Estonian composer Helena Tulve. But there is also a professional concert series, and the most enticing of this summer is the concert dedicated to the 98th birthday of the late Leon Fleisher, one of the greatest American pianists, who spent much of the later part of his career playing with only one hand, and who died in 2020 at the age of 92. The appropriately juicy and surprising program consists of music by Bach, Schubert, Berg, Schoenberg, Korngold, Kurt Weill. and Harold Arlen. Arlen’s “One for My Baby” will be sung by Fleisher’s famous son, singer Julian Fleisher (July 23).
RHODE ISLAND
Newport | July 2-19
Now in its 57th year, the Newport Classical festival fills the grand mansions with soloists and chamber groups, both the well-known and the not-well-known-yet. The season opens with the group Delirium Musicum (need I say more) on July 2 and closes with the Harlem Quartet (“and friends”) for an evening of string octets (July 19), both concerts at the grandest of the mansions, the Breakers, right on the shoreline. My first choice would be the refined Parker Quartet (also at the Breakers) in an evening of early Beethoven, Paul Wiancko’s “Strange Beloved Land” (which the Parkers premiered in 2013), and Schubert’s G-major Quartet (July 5). I also can’t leave out mentioning — while there are still tickets left — a concert of opera solos and duets with two of the Metropolitan Opera’s most popular stars, soprano Erin Morley and tenor Lawrence Brownlee (The Breakers, July 18).
MAINE
Portland | July 23 & 26
Opera Maine began presenting an annual summer opera in 1995. Now under the artistic direction of Dona D. Vaughan, who is also the company stage director, the company’s 2026 opera is a relatively rare fully staged production of Gounod’s tuneful “Roméo et Juliette.” I couldn’t find any cast listed on the website. But if you’re in the vicinity this July, Opera Maine bills itself as the only company in Maine offering full-staged opera productions.
Various locations | Aug. 4-16
Salt Bay’s season this summer is called “Music Unearthed,” which sounds a little ominous. But looking at the programs and the players, you find more daylight than darkness. My top choice is the second program, “Earth & Sky,” with such familiar and unfamiliar delights as the opening Allegro movement from Haydn’s heavenly “The Lark” Quartet (“The lark at break of day arising/From sullen earth,” as Shakespeare put it), Hawk Henries playing the Eastern Woodland flute in three of his own pieces (“Earth and Sky,” “Song for the Birds” and “Song for the Earth”), Messiaen’s “Abîme des oiseaux,” and the great Brahms Clarinet Quintet featuring Boston favorite Romie de Guise-Langlois (Lincoln Theater, Damariscotta, Aug. 7).
CONNECTICUT
Norfolk | July 3-Aug. 22
Yale School of Music’s NCMS offers a summer full of concerts by both the young artists in the summer program and world-renowned visiting guest artists, like the celebrated Brentano String Quartet, which is offering two concerts this summer. I’d pick the second, which includes the fourth of Haydn’s first great series of quartets, Opus 20; Mozart’s sublime and unsettling Quartet in D-minor, K. 421; and one of the least-frequently played of Beethoven’s so-called Middle Quartets, Op. 59, No. 2, the “second Razumovsky” (July 18). Also, the marvelous violinist Augustin Hadelich turns up here for a solo recital, similar but not quite the same as his concert in Rockport. The composers are Telemann, Coleridge-Taylor Parkinson, and Ysaÿe again, but then there’s also Bach, the heroic second solo Partita in D-minor (July 25).
VERMONT
Marlboro | July 18-Aug. 16
With the possible exception of Tanglewood, the Marlboro festival — founded in 1951 by some of the most admired musicians in the world (who were all immigrants) — is probably the most famous summer classical music event east of the Mississippi. And unlike Tanglewood, where you know well in advance what you’re getting, at Marlboro you don’t know anything about the programs until the week before the actual public performance you might be attending. But that’s never stopped anyone from being part of the capacity audience listening to performance by some of the 75 gifted instrumentalists and singers of all ages who have been spending the previous seven weeks (including three weeks of intensive rehearsals) working with celebrities like pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Jonathan Biss, who are the current Marlboro directors, and each year’s composer-in-residence (this year, it’s the exciting Brazilian composer Marcos Balter).
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