New England Philharmonic Opens 50th Anniversary Season with a Musical Exploration of America’s Stories
The New England Philharmonic (NEP) opens its 50th anniversary season on Saturday, October 24, 2026, at 7:00 p.m. at Boston University's Tsai Performance Center with Foundations and Faultlines: New England Histories, a concert exploring how America's stories are remembered, celebrated, and challenged. The program features a collaboration with the Middlesex County Volunteers Fifes & Drums and NEP Concertmaster Danielle Maddon as soloist in Joan Tower's Violin Concerto, alongside music by composers spanning three centuries.
The concert launches NEP’s season, Stories of Land, Memory, and Belonging, which highlights the diverse voices and experiences that have shaped New England and the nation. Through music spanning centuries and perspectives, the program brings together familiar American musical traditions and contemporary works that invite audiences to reconsider the stories we tell about our shared history.
“In a year that celebrates both the semiquincentennial of the United States and the fiftieth anniversary of the orchestra, it seemed fitting to join the national celebrations by bringing to our stages the stories of populations often underrepresented through music by composers of the present and recent past,” says NEP Music Director Tianhui Ng. “In keeping with NEP’s traditions, this program brings the newest perspectives of our time into dialogue with those of the past.
The evening opens with William Billings’s Remember Thee, O Boston, followed by the premiere of Liberty, From the Ashes of Tyranny, a new work by Evan Meier performed in collaboration with the Middlesex County Volunteers Fifes & Drums. Together, these works bring the music and history of the American Revolution into conversation with a contemporary musical perspective.
The program continues with William Schuman’s New England Triptych, which takes three works by William Billings as its starting point. By transforming Billings’s Revolutionary-era music into a distinctive 20th-century work, Schuman creates a musical dialogue across generations—one that resonates with the concert’s exploration of how American stories are remembered and retold.
NEP Concertmaster Danielle Maddon takes center stage as soloist in Joan Tower's Violin Concerto, a dynamic work by one of America’s leading contemporary composers.
The program also features Incident at Wounded Knee by Louis W. Ballard (Quapaw/Cherokee), bringing attention to a pivotal and painful chapter in American history, and concludes with Leonard Bernstein's exuberant “Symphonic Dances” from West Side Story. The Bernstein work is paired with a new response piece by NEP Composer-in-Residence Carlos Carrillo, creating a musical conversation around the themes and stories that continue to shape American life.