A guide to Greater Boston's bounty of spring classical music events

“Harken to the tidings that will bring the spring!” That’s what we sang in the third grade to the tune of “Spring Song,” Mendelssohn’s most famous “Song without Words.” We all hope this hard winter is now over, and that spring will suddenly fill the air. Here’s a catalogue of upcoming spring concerts, many of which sound not only seasonal but irresistible. And don’t forget the numerous free upcoming concerts at our local parks, schools, conservatories and churches.

Three of our leading orchestra’s five low-price morning family concerts led by Thomas Wilkins are already sold out. "Sounding Together: An Exploration of Courage, Caution, and Kindness" includes tuneful excerpts from works by Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Bonds, Gounod, Grieg and Carlos Simon (March 22).

The next concert is also sure to be packed: Mozart’s unfinished final work, his beloved Requiem, with Finnish conductor Dima Slobodeniouk leading a cast that includes the Metropolitan Opera lyric soprano Erin Morley, mezzo-soprano Avery Amereau, tenor Simon Bode and impressive young bass Morris Robinson. The concert begins with Arvo Pärt’s “Tabula Rasa” (March 27-29). Then Slobodeniouk returns the following week with three pieces that responded to war, Adolphus Hailstorks’s “Lachrymosa: 1919,” Stravinsky’s great but seldom programed Symphony in Three Movements, and the Elgar Violin Concerto with German violin virtuoso Frank Peter Zimmermann (April 3-5).

The BSO’s music director Andris Nelsons returns to the composer for whom he’s currently most admired in a series called “Decoding Shostakovich.” He begins with two of the composer’s least performed symphonies, Nos. 6 and 11 (April 10). Then, for one night only, Nelsons repeats the Shostakovich 11th along with his first Cello Concerto, with Yo-Yo Ma, a concert already listed as sold out but there’s always a last-minute chance for a returned ticket (April 11).

The following week, the beloved pianist Mitsuko Uchida joins Nelsons in Beethoven’s most beloved piano concerto, No. 4, on a program with Shostakovich’s uncanny final symphony (April 17-19). Nelsons then repeats the 6th after the world premiere of Aleksandra Vrebalov’s “Love Canticles” for chorus and orchestra, a BSO commission, and Stravinsky’s ”Symphony of Psalms,” a profound work I hope Nelsons has begun to figure out how to bring to life (April 26-27). The Shostakovich series and the entire spring season concludes with the composer’s Violin Concerto No. 1, with Nelsons’ eloquent Latvian compatriot and frequent collaborator Baiba Skride, and Symphony No. 8 (May 2-3).

Boston’s “doctors’ orchestra” consists largely of serious amateur players who are primarily healthcare professionals, giving ambitious concerts both for the pleasure of playing and to raise money for deserving nonprofit medical organizations (a different one for each concert). Since 1991, the Longwood has collected more than $2.8 million for more than 50 “Community Partners.” This spring, music director Jotaro Nakano leads two programs. “Lux Aeterna” (benefiting the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation) includes the world premiere of Zachary Fick-Cambria’s “Invictus,” Morten Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna (Eternal Light),” with the Longwood Chorus, and Brahms’s First Symphony (March 22). Florence Price’s “Adoration” provides the title for the second program (benefiting Vinfen), which includes a guest performance by Cambridge Common Voices and the Rachmaninoff Second Symphony (May 10).

This past February, Benjamin Zander, celebrating his 86th birthday, delivered one of the most expressive and beautiful of his legendary Mahler performances, the enchanting Symphony No. 4, which ends with a child’s view of heaven (British soprano Claire Booth gave that wide-eyed child an infinitely touching presence). This spring, Zander offers Mahler’s overwhelming Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”), with Swedish soprano Miah Persson and the heartbreaking British mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly, who made an extraordinary appearance in 2022’s Mahler, “Das Lied von der Erde.” Boston’s Chorus pro Musica plays another crucial role in this apocalyptic masterpiece (April 18).

Zander’s remarkable Youth Philharmonic offers a varied program of Debussy’s seductive “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” Walton’s Cello Concerto with recent Montreal competition winner (and YPO graduate) Leland Ko, and Rachmaninoff’s long-winded Symphony No. 2 (May 1).

Francisco Noya leads the Civic Symphony in the Beethoven 9th, a work so familiar that the audience is actually invited to sing along with the chorus in the final “Ode to Joy.” The hard-working chorus is Boston’s versatile and game Chorus pro Musica. (Music Director Jamie Kirsch leads the group this season in such diverse works as Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony with the Boston Philharmonic, April 18, and John Adams’s “Harmonium” with the New England Philharmonic, May 3.) The Beethoven soloists will be soprano Patrice Tiedemann, alto Emily Harmon, tenor Neal Ferreira and bass Daniel Brevik.

Music director Tianhui Ng leads the New England Philharmonic’s spring program “Paths of Peace” in two proven 20th-century masterpieces — Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” (1934) and John Adams’ “Harmonium” (1980) with Boston’s Chorus pro Musica. The group will also performtwo relatively untested works in their Boston premieres: Roxanna Panufnik’s “Abraham,” with one of my favorite violinists Danielle Maddon (2015), and Eric Nathan’s “Open again a turn of light” (2023).

The Celebrity Series of Boston is the organization we turn to for the widest selection of visiting artists outside of the guest virtuosos performing with the BSO. Springtime brings the esteemed Calidore String Quartet in a thoughtful program beginning with one of the least played of Beethoven’s string quartets, the “Harp,” along with Jessie Montgomery’s “Strum,” Schubert’s exquisite single-movement “Quartettsatz,” and a real rarity, Korngold’s String Quartet No. 3 (NEC’s Jordan Hall, March 23).

Lovers of traditional classical music will be excited by the appearance together of celebrated German violinist Julia Fischer and Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki in sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven (the “Spring” Sonata, of course) and Schumann (NEC’s Jordan Hall, March 28).

The great Borromeo String Quartet makes an appearance as both performer and mentor. After playing a variety of selections, the quartet will be joined by the young musicians of the Boston String Academy, who they’ve been coaching in Tchaikovsky's “Souvenir de Florence” (Salvation Army Kroc Center, March 29).

Russian pianist Zlata Chochieva is better known in Europe than in this country. She’s making her Boston debut with a program that includes pieces by Schumann, Brahms and Rachmaninoff (one of her specialties), beginning with a Bartók arrangement of a movement from a Bach organ sonata and Rachmaninoff’s arrangement of the ebullient Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s music for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Longy’s Pickman Hall, April 1).

The youngest cellist ever to win a Tchaikovsky Competition gold medal, 26-year-old cellist Zlatomir Fung makes his Celebrity Series debut with a fascinating program that suggests his love for opera and film. He’ll be playing an arrangement for cello and piano of Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 3, along with a series of arrangements of some well-known pieces composed for other instruments. The piece I’m most eager to hear is his own arrangement of Bernard Herrmann’s unforgettable “Scène d’amour” — the intense love music from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (Longy’s Pickman Hall, April 16; Groton Hill Music Center, April 17).

I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool fan of celebrity Russian piano virtuoso Evgeny Kissin, but I admit that in certain repertoire he can be very exciting and not merely virtuosic for its own sake. His Celebrity Series program includes a shot at the Bach C-minor Partita, a selection of Chopin nocturnes, and the composer with whom Kissin ought to excel, Shostakovich (Symphony Hall, April 29).

This feisty little company overflows with imaginative ideas. This season, BOC is delivering Humperdinck’s ever-endearing “Hänsel und Gretel.” This opera is about food, so BOC is reimagining it as a food drive for the Brookline Food Pantry.

The Boston Lyric Opera’s 2024-2025 season got off to a shaky start. Mozart’s early opera seria “Mitridate” was a mixed bag (good singers, unfocused staging, uninspired conducting) and the concert version of Verdi’s “Aida” came close to disaster (begging the question about performing a concert version of an opera that relies so heavily on spectacle). BLO is now turning to Broadway with a new production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s beloved musical “Carousel” (Emerson Colonial Theatre, April 4-13) directed by Anne Bogart, whose sensational 2019 staging in a Harvard basketball court of Poul Ruders’ “The Handmaid’s Tale” was one of the most impressive productions in BLO history. Bogart has written about the contemporary issues she’ll be exploring — "domestic violence, cycles of poverty and crime, suicide, and toxic masculinity” — without sacrificing the show’s inherent magic.

“Carousel” has R&H’s most poignant love duet, “If I Loved You,” and one of the team’s soggiest spiritual anthems, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” The cast includes soprano Brandie Sutton as the mill girl Julie Jordan, baritone Edward Nelson as the carnival barker Billy Bigelow, the Metropolitan Opera’s star mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton as Nettie Fowler — not walking alone, and soprano Anya Matanoviĉ as Julie’s chirpy friend Carrie. Fun historical fact: in 1945, “Carousel” had its first out-of-town tryout at the Colonial Theatre.

BLO ends its season with a single performance of Benjamin Britten’s delightful “biblical” opera for and with children, “Noah’s Flood” (Symphony Hall, May 3), based on a 15th-century English miracle play. A.R.T.’s Dayron Miles stages the production with baritone David McFerrin and mezzo-soprano Alexis Peart as Noah and Mrs. Noah, along with members of the Boston Children’s Chorus, Boston String Academy, Back Bay Ringers, VOICES Boston, Boston Recorder Orchestra, Community Music Center of Boston, Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New England Conservatory Preparatory School. David Angus conducts. Tickets are free.

Known more familiarly as “Ben & Brad,” because Benjamin Sears and Bradford Conner are its co-founders and best-known performers, American Classics is unique in the Boston area — delighting audiences in the repertoire of Broadway musicals and other popular songs (sometimes giving us a chance to hear the whole score of a forgotten show). Their 2024-25 season — “Sun, Moon, and Stars” — has been devoted to songs referring to those astronomical phenomena. The final concert, “Wish Upon a Star,” will include such standards as “Swinging on a Star,” “You Are My Lucky Star,” “Star-Dust” and “Stars Fell on Alabama,” along with songs like “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” “All The Things You Are,” “How Deep is the Ocean,” “Begin the Beguine” and “The Man that Got Away” with more secret stellar references. Joining Ben & Brad in this delectable romp are Valerie Anastasio, Jean Danton, Michelle Deluise, Christina English, Brandan Milardo, Wes Hunter and John Manning with pianist Steve Sussman.

Emmanuel’s weekly Bach cantatas are a kind of spiritual center of musical life in Boston. Though the cantatas are actually part of the 10 a.m. church service, the public is welcome to arrive at 11 a.m. just to hear the cantatas. Music director Ryan Turner leads most of them, and the illuminating notes on the cantatas by the late Craig Smith, Emmanuel Music’s founding music director (with additions by Turner), are very much worth reading. On May 4, Elena Ruehr’s “Songs of the Earth” will replace the Bach (March 23-May 11).

Not choral music, the free Thursday afternoon Lindsay Chapel series continues its cycle of Bach’s English Suites with harpsichordist Peter Sykes (March 27 and April 3) and Sylvia Berry (April 10).

The biggest Emmanuel event will be Ryan Turner leading Bach’s monumental B-minor Mass. The 11 superb soloists are a shortlist of some of the best singers in Boston: sopranos Susan Consoli, Carley DeFranco, Sonja Tengblad and Janet Ross; altos Krista River, Carrie Cheron, Katherine Maysek and Deborah Rentz-Moore; tenors Jonas Budris and Charles Blandy; and basses Nathan Halbur and Will Prapestis (May 3).

The Cantata Singers’ first spring concert will be a chamber program directed by Allison Voth, celebrating Boston composers past (Amy Beach, Arthur Foote and Leonard Bernstein), present (Peter Child, John Harbison, Marti Epstein and Elena Ruehr), and with the gifted young composer Omar Najmi, future (French Library, Boston, March 30). Then music director Noah Horn will conduct Joby Talbot’s “Path of Miracles” (2005), a 75-minute piece scored for crotales and a 17-part choir singing in seven different languages (Saint Cecilia Parish, Boston, May 2).

So far, the Gardner Museum Sunday afternoon concerts have been the best musical events I’ve been to this year. The spring season begins with French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau and two of his colleagues from the period-instrument ensemble NEVERMIND, violinist Louis Creac’h and viola da gambist Robin Pharo, in an afternoon devoted to French Baroque music, including works by Marin Marais and Couperin as well as some lesser-known composers (March 23).

The Morgenstern Piano Trio, from Germany, is offering a program associated with Isabella Stewart Gardner herself in several ways: pieces by two of the leading women composers of her time, Germaine Tailleferre and Lili Boulanger, and pieces by composers Gardner actually met: Fauré and Brahms (the heavenly Piano Trio in B flat, Op. 8). The press release informs us that Gardner actually possessed a cigarette hand-rolled by Brahms himself (March 30).

Stellar cellist Sterling Elliott returns to the Gardner to explore the “American sound,” with works by 19th-century composer Amy Beach and a stylistic spectrum of works by 20th and 21st-century Black composers William Grant Still, George Walker, Jean Perrault and Kevin Day (April 27).

Few groups have a more devoted following than this exciting conductorless chamber music collective, which has three subscription programs coming up, each curated by a member of the ensemble and each with a typically witty title. First, there’s “For Seasons” (not a typo!), a program dealing with climate change curated by Michael Unterman, which includes Vivaldi’s fabulous foursome interspersed with “seasoned” works by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Sufjan Stevens, Quinn Mason and Caroline Shaw (Groton Hill Music Center, March 28; NEC’s Jordan Hall, March 29).

Next, in “Sibling Sounds,” curator Sarah Darling gives us music by Vivaldi, Telemann, Bacewicz and Gubaidulina for the rare combination of either four violins or four cellos (St. John’s Church, Jamaica Plain, April 12; First Church Cambridge, April 13). And finally, curator Caitlin Lynch has invited Canadian pianist Stewart Goodyear (famous for performing all 32 Beethoven sonatas in a single day) to play pieces by Franz Schreker, Felix Mendelssohn, Teresa Carreño and, in its U.S. premiere, his own “Eclipse” for piano and string orchestra (NEC’s Jordan Hall, May 9).

In “The Lyrical Impulse,” David Feltner’s chamber orchestra gives us Schubert’s profound last string quartet in an arrangement for string orchestra, George Walker’s “Lyric for Strings” (a tribute to his grandmother), and arrangements of Dvořák songs and Shetland and Scottish folk songs. Feltner then closes the season with “Flights of Fancy,” a musical world tour including music from British composer Granville Bantock’s “Scenes from the Scottish Highlands” to American composer Derek Bermel’s “Murmurations” (evoking the flight of starlings), Turkish composer Mehmet Ali Sanlikol’s “Vecd,” Berklee professor Jimmy Kachulis’ “African Violet” and traditional Danish songs.

The extraordinary Lydian String Quartet has been in residence at Brandeis University for more than four decades, though alarming news reports indicate that we don’t know for how much longer. In a program called “Time’s Echo Live,” the Lydians will be joined by Jeremy Eichler, the author of the extraordinary “Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance.” Eichler, the former Boston Globe chief classical music critic, who is now teaching at Tufts, is an eloquent speaker as well as an eloquent writer. His talk about Shostakovich’s response to the war will be followed by the Lydians performing Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 3. This promises to be an unforgettable and moving event (March 29).

The Lydians will be back with a super-contemporary concert featuring Indian American composer Reena Esmail’s “This is It” (2023) and the world premiere of Mexican American composer Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon’s “Barbaverde en Mineralis,” the winner of the Lydian String Quartet Commission Prize. Soprano Leah Brzyski and guitar player Dieter Hennings are the guest performers (April 26).

Flutist Julie Scolnik ends the season of her group Mistral with “Reflections from the Seine” — which, as you might guess, is a program of French hidden gems and masterpieces for various combinations of flute (Scolnik), harp (Jessica Zhou, whom Scolnik calls the BSO’s “principal harp goddess”), and strings (guest violinists Siwoo Kim and Maureen Nelson join Mistral violist Stephanie Fong, French cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau and clarinetist Catherine Hudgins). The major works will be Debussy’s only String Quartet and Ravel’s gorgeous Introduction and Allegro for harp, string quartet, flute and clarinet. (If you miss this, it reappears on the April 11 Winsor Music concert, with another outstanding harp player, Charles Overton.) I’m also curious about the Quintet for flute, string trio, and harp by a French composer I don’t know at all, Jean Cras.

“The Passionate Viola,” the Pro Arte gets its title primarily from Jennifer Higdon’s Viola Concerto (described as “intense”), with Pro Arte’s principal violist Anne Black, one of Boston’s most esteemed freelancers, under the direction of the Boston Ballet’s Assistant Conductor Alyssa Wang. But it’s the other pieces on the program that I find especially alluring: Haydn’s Symphony No. 95 in C minor (we never seem to get enough Haydn) and Stravinsky’s most exuberant and tuneful score, based on melodies by an array of 18th-century composers (Second Church in Newton, April 6). In its Salon Series, the Pro Arte offers a smaller-scale and more intimate chamber music concert titled “New Winds and Friends.” This one features two Mozart pieces: the charming “Kegelstatt Trio” for clarinet, viola and piano, and the great E-flat Piano Quintet (Newton’s The Allen Center, May 4).

BSO Assistant Conductor Anna Handler will be leading the chamber players — stellar members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra — in Elena Langer’s “Five Reflections on Water.” Then the players are on their own, with guest pianist Gilbert Kalish, in Sofia Gubaidulina’s Sonata for double bass and piano and one of the great chamber works of the 20th century, the Shostakovich Piano Quintet in G minor.

Winsor’s final concert of the season has a special guest: classical and jazz superstar harpist Charles Overton, who’ll be collaborating with Winsor’s own star players — Rane Moore, clarinet; Sarah Brady, flute; Peggy Pearson, oboe; Gabriela Díaz and Katherine Winterstein, violins; Cara Pogossian, viola; and David Russell, cello. The extremely varied program will include works by Henriette Renie, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Gilad Cohen and Maurice Ravel’s super-saturated Introduction and Allegro, along with Overton’s own compositions, including his arrangements of Richard Rogers (“My Favorite Things”) and Morgan Lewis (“How High the Moon”), and the world premiere of Kevin Harris’ “Song for the Spirit.”

This spring’s Music for Food concert is in collaboration with Putney, Vermont’s Yellow Barn series. The program will include three vocal works: “silences/larmes” by Helena Tulve, Arnold Schoenberg’s “The Book of the Hanging Gardens” and Francis Poulenc’s melodramatic musical monologue “La voix humaine.” Donations, including free admission, will go to support the Women’s Lunch Place.

Perhaps in honor of its final season under the aegis of its brilliant founding director, BSO violinist Wendy Putnam, the legendary Juilliard String Quartet will close this CCMS season with one of the most alluring programs of any season. The concert opens with Haydn’s String Quartet in G-minor, Op. 20, No. 3. (If Haydn was “the father of the string quartet,” might this be the first great string quartet in a minor key?) It continues with one of the string quartets Mozart dedicated to Haydn, K. 458 in B-flat, “The Hunt,” with one of the most sublime slow movements ever written. Do we want this concert ever to end? But if it must, why not with Smetana’s moving autobiographical String Quartet No. 1 in E-minor, “From My Life.” The current membership of the Juilliard Quartet consists of Areta Zhulla and Ronald Copes, violins; Molly Carr, viola; and Astrid Schween, cello — none of whom are old enough to have been in the original Juilliard.

Under the direction of the beloved violist Marcus Thompson, BCMS includes some of Boston’s most esteemed chamber music players. The highlight of its remaining two spring concerts might be Boston composer Peter Child’s “Four Movements after Kandinsky” for Oboe, Viola, and Piano (a 2024 BCMS commission), with one of my favorite configurations of players: Peggy Pearson, oboe; Marcus Thompson, viola; and Max Levinson, piano. A Beethoven string trio and Mendelssohn’s D-minor Piano Trio are also on the program (April 13). Pearson, one of Boston’s true treasures, returns in the final BCMS concert playing — with Levinson again — Clara Schumann’s “Three Romances” and — with Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet; Isabelle Ai Durrenberger, violin; Jennifer Frautschi and Marcus Thompson, violas; and Raman Ramakrishnan, cello — American composer, teacher and critic Marion Bauer’s Concertino for Oboe, Clarinet, and Strings, Op. 32 (1939–44). This strong program also features Brahms’s C-minor Piano Quartet and Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor, both with Levinson at the keyboard (May 11).

This distinguished concert series has only one concert coming up this spring: a tribute to Beethoven. The program includes three consecutive works, Opus 95, 96 and 97, respectively for four, two and three players. Violinist Joseph Lin will perform in each. His partners are fellow violinist Claire Bourg, violist Hsin-Yun Huang, cellist Raman Ramakrishnan and pianist Helen Huang.

Jennifer Montbach’s Radius Ensemble ends its spring season with (what else?) “Bloom,” which includes a brand new trio for flute, viola and cello by the student winner of the Pappalardo Composition Award, New Zealand composer Salina Fisher’s “Unfinished Portrait” for flute, oboe, bassoon and piano, and an all-too-rare performance of Schubert’s irresistible Octet.

Glissando, the chamber music series founded by the extraordinary pianist Sergey Schepkin closes its 2024-25 season with Schepkin on his own in a program of Debussy and Schumann called “Masques et Bergamasques,” which loosely translates to music for Commedia del’Arte masquerades and music for country dances. The Debussy selections include both: “Masques,” an ironically named piece less festive than melancholy, even tragic; “D’un cahier d’esquisses” (from a sketchbook); and “L'isle Joyeuse” (the legendary island of romantic escape). These are followed by one of Schumann’s keyboard masterpieces, the wonderful “Carnaval,” in which he uses the language of rollicking festivity to explore the complex sides of his own nature and his love for his wife Clara. Schepkin has come up with an irresistible — and profound — program.

“The Muse” — muses, really — for Sarasa’s last concert of the season are Anna Akhmatova and Yukio Mishima. We are promised “a grand voyage of wonderfully contrasting soundscapes,” including works by Florence Price, John Tavener, Philip Glass and Emilie Mayer. The ensemble performs twice in Massachusetts, at Cambridge’s Friends Meeting House (May 17) and the Follen Community Church in Lexington (May 18), and once in Vermont at the Brattleboro Music Center (May 16).

Handel + Haydn Society started when Handel, Haydn and Mozart were still “new” music, and Beethoven was still alive. Current Music Director Jonathan Cohen and the H+H chorus and period-instrument orchestra celebrate the arrival of spring with the enchanting “Spring” section of Haydn’s late oratorio “The Seasons,” followed by a rare performance (at least rarer than the Ninth Symphony) of Beethoven’s masterly C-major Mass, with some impressive vocal soloists: soprano Emőke Baráth, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano, tenor Andrew Haji and baritone Thomas Bauer (March 28 and 30).

Cohen ends the season with no less than the internationally celebrated fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout in the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4. We’ll also get some unusual but memorable Mozart, his stirring incidental music for a play called “Thamos, King of Egypt” by Tobias Philipp von Gebler, performed with the H+H Youth Choruses. And the H+H season winds up with Haydn’s “The Bear,” the symphony with the exuberant finale inspired by dancing bears (May 2 and 4).

Martin Pearlman leads “North America’s first permanent Baroque orchestra” in two appealing staples of the classical repertoire, Mozart’s energetic “Haffner” Symphony and Beethoven’s inventive Symphony No. 2. But the real star of the show is sure to be Metropolitan Opera’s delightful coloratura soprano Erin Morley singing several as yet unlisted Mozart concert arias — important vocal works that don’t get performed as often as they should (March 21-22).

Pearlman ends his final season as Boston Baroque’s founding director with one of the greatest of all Baroque operas, Handel’s magnificent “Ariodante.” The stellar cast includes Megan Moore in the title role of a medieval Scottish prince who thinks he has been betrayed by his beloved Ginevra, daughter of the King of Scotland (Boston favorite Amanda Forsythe), and Ann McMahon Quintero as Polinesso, the plotting Duke of Albany. One of Handel’s most unforgettable arias, Ariodante’s unforgettable and tragic “Scherza infida” (laughing betrayer), is alone worth the price of admission. Spoiler alert: there’s a happy ending (April 24-27).

Because we’re in an odd-numbered year, it means that early music enthusiasts, musicians and scholars from all over the world will be gathering in Boston for a week in June. The high point is usually the spectacular full-scale, all-stops-pulled-out production of what is usually an opera little known to a general or even a knowledgeable audience. To appreciate BEMF at its most literally marvelous, here’s a link to an aria, “Sfere amiche” (friendly spheres), from its 2011 production of Agostino Steffani’s “Niobe,” with the great countertenor Philippe Jaroussky as the king who would rather listen to the music of the spheres than run his country:

This year, the over-arching theme of the festival is “Power & Love,” and the centerpiece opera is German composer Reinhard Keiser’s “Octavia,” which had its first performance in Hamburg in 1705. Hungarian soprano Emőke Baráth sings the title role, with Douglas Williams as Nero, along with such Boston stalwarts as Amanda Forsyth, Aaron Sheehan and Jason McStoots. As always, the music is under the consistently fine direction of Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, with stage direction by the sometimes less consistent Gilbert Blin (Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, June 8-15).

Besides the opera, the festival week will include 18 concerts as well as an organ and keyboard “mini-festival.” The first day alone will include concerts by ACRONYM, The Tallis Scholars with the English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble, and tenor Aaron Sheehan with Paul O’Dette on lute and theorbo (all on June 9). And there’s a seductive program called “Starry, Starry Night: Music of Monteverdi, Luigi Rossi, Carissimi, and Steffani” (and I’ll bet anything it will include that extraordinary music-of-the-spheres aria from “Niobe”) with the BEMF Chamber Orchestra and most of the principal singers from the opera (NEC’s Jordan Hall, June 14).

But the Boston Early Music Festival takes place more than just the big week, and some major early-music stars will be in Boston before the official “festival” actually begins: Stile Antiche performing the ensemble’s favorite selections (St. Paul Church in Cambridge, March 28); the extraordinary Les Arts Florissants, with violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte, playing Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” (NEC’s Jordan Hall, April 4); and most celebrated of all, gambist Jordi Savall & Hespèrion XXI in “Music of Fire and Love: an eclectic program of folías, variations, and improvisations” (NEC’s Jordan Hall, April 13).

Scott Metcalfe’s deeply admired vocal ensemble is joined by two actors for “Song of Songs/Songs of love,” a program revived from when the group last performed it in 2012. The music includes 16th-century settings of the biblical “Song of Songs” along with Spanish love songs and poems recited in Spanish and Hebrew.

For its 70th season, Boston Camerata, under the direction of Anne Azéma, will be performing two of its signature endeavors: not only early European music but early American music, in which it remains a major pioneer. “Trav’ling Home” is a program of American spirituals from 1770-1870 and will include vocal music from the Puritan, Shaker, Amish, Mennonite and the newly freed African American religious communities (Old West Church, Boston, April 27)

Boston Camerata will also be a special guest at the Boston Early Music Festival, in a program called “A Gallery of Kings: Uses and Abuses of Power ca. 1300.” The Camerata’s description tells us that “songs and stories of powerful Kings, both good and bad, abound in the Middle Ages” and that these songs remind us that “a monarch's power is limited: by his fallible judgement, his formidable adversaries, his love of power, and his own, precarious mortality.” Sung in Latin, German, Galician, Old English and French, these songs, we’re reminded, “resonate strongly down the centuries, into our own, turbulent time” (NEC’s Jordan Hall, June 10).

Glass armonica virtuoso Dennis James joins the Musicians of the Old Post Road in what promises to be a delightful program, titled “Through the Listening Glass,” of works composed for glass armonica (sometimes known as glass harmonica), an instrument of delicate color and flute-like affect invented by Benjamin Franklin. Featured will be what is probably the greatest work composed for that instrument, Mozart’s late “Adagio and Rondo,” along with more obscure works by J. F. Reichardt and J. G. Naumann, and early American composers John Antes and John Christopher Moller.

This most convivial of early-music groups draws the spring season to a close with concerts involving songs sung at taverns — bawdy and naughty, tender and rousing. One of these will be held in a church (Church of the Good Shepherd in Watertown, May 13) and one in an actual tavern (Medford Brewing Company, May 14). Seven Times Salt will then present “From Plimouth to Yorktown: Music of Early America” — 18th-century songs and dance music to celebrate the 250th anniversary of “the shot heard round the world” (Church of St. Andrew in Marblehead, June 1).

Gil Rose’s Boston Modern Orchestra Project is the rare orchestra devoted entirely to modern and contemporary music. I especially admire Rose’s performances of operas and musicals, but his orchestral concerts are worth our serious attention. This spring, in “Turning Point,” BMOP is featuring two works by Christopher Theofanidis from just around the turn of the millennium (one with the catchy title “As Dancing is to Architecture”), and two world premieres, Jeremy Gill’s “Four Legends from the Silmarillion” (2023) and Han Lash’s “Zero Turning Radius” Concerto for Orchestra (2024).

Founded by BSO percussionist Frank Epstein in 1972, Collage New Music has been one of the groundbreaking organizations in bringing contemporary music to Boston. For more than 30 years, Collage was led by David Hoose, who is now, as of this season, music director emeritus. And it’s in that new position that he’ll be leading this season’s final Collage concert. Called “We Carry Our Homes Within Us,” it’s a spectacular program that looks both backward and forward to milestone Collage commissions. We’ll be treated to Yehudi Wyner’s “Passage” with its piquant and poignant ensemble including flute, clarinet and trumpet, a Collage 10th-anniversary commission.

Another treat is sure to be the world premiere of Michael Gandolfi’s newly commissioned “Lowell Songs,” with Collage’s celebrated artistic partner, soprano Tony Arnold. And the Boston premiere of “Happened,” Yaz Lancaster’s commission to mark the conclusion of Eric Nathan’s first season as Collage’s new artistic director. The program also includes Reinaldo Moya’s 2018 “The Earth Outlived the Hands that Held It,” Marcos Balter’s 2015 “We Carry Our Homes Within Us Which Enables Us to Fly,” and John Heiss’ “Soliloquy” for flute and piano, performed in memory of the late composer and flutist who was so dear to the Boston musical community. And to conclude, a special tribute to Frank Epstein on his retirement from Collage with John Harbison’s “Prelude – Variations” (2024) — a Collage commission, of course.