26/27: Carnegie Hall, Oregon Symphony, Warsaw Philharmonic + More
Ask Nic where in the world he'd most like to travel, and — after a lifetime of airports — he is just as likely to say he'd rather stay home. "There is no place like home," he says. "I know that sounds like an old song. But home sweet home — it's very nice." Which is the quiet joke of the season now opening in front of him: it will carry him from Frankfurt to Warsaw to Wall Street and back again to Berkeley, and he cannot wait to go.
A Year of Bach, Handel, and Familiar Faces
As music director emeritus of Philharmonia Baroque — the orchestra he led for thirty-five years — McGegan has settled into what he calls a more European idea of a conductor. "I make music," he says, "and other people do everything else." No auditions, no budgets, no boards; just the podium and the people around it. And the people, this season, are the point.
The autumn just opened in Germany, where he joined the Brandenburg State Orchestra Frankfurt this September for Beethoven, Hoffmeister, and Haydn's Symphony No. 100. From there the year unspools across two continents: Handel's Royal Fireworks Music and a Bach cantata with the Calgary Philharmonic in October; Handel's L'Allegro with the Warsaw Philharmonic in November. Nearly every one of these is a room McGegan has walked into before — an orchestra he has returned to for years, a city where he still knows people at the next restaurant table.
Then comes December, and the heart of the season. McGegan conducts Handel's Messiah on period instruments at Trinity Church Wall Street, in the middle of Lower Manhattan — one of the works most bound up with the season, in one of the most storied rooms in America. Days later he is in Denmark for Bach's Christmas Oratorio with a return to the Aalborg Symphony, and then home in Berkeley to close the year with the same Christmas Oratorio alongside Cantata Collective. Two of the pillars of the December repertoire, on two continents, inside three weeks.
For a conductor who could easily spend his life in transit, McGegan measures the road by its friendships — and by the conviction that no two nights are ever the same. "You never stick a performance in the microwave," he likes to say, "and expect it to come out the same the next day."
A Return to Opera
February brings something McGegan relishes: an opera, and a room full of young musicians. He leads the Curtis Opera Theatre in Haydn's Orlando Paladino on February 18 and 20 in Philadelphia. Working with students, he says, keeps the repertoire perpetually new — "the chances that any of them has played it before is very, very unlikely," which means everyone in the room is discovering it at once. It is, for a man who has conducted these scores for half a century, a reliable way to hear them fresh.
Spring Out West
The new year's second half turns toward home ground. In April, McGegan is with the Utah Symphony in Salt Lake City for Bach, Haydn, and Vivaldi, and then makes his debut with the Oregon Symphony in Portland for a program crowned by Beethoven's “Emperor” Concerto. June brings the Händel-Festspiele Halle and Sarasota Music Festival. Then to close, a Carnegie Hall evening with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and tenor Nicholas Phan — Bach cantatas among friends in New York.
Nic leads Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall.
What Nic’s Exploring
The through-line of the year is Bach and Handel — the two German masters McGegan has spent a career moving between. Having devoted decades to Handel with Philharmonia, he has, in recent seasons, turned toward Bach with Cantata Collective, recording the great choral works one a year with the same circle of musicians and singers. "Making music with friends, for friends," he has often said, "is about the best thing a musician can have." The December Christmas Oratorio in Berkeley is the next chapter of exactly that.
If one of these programs is near you this season, come and hear a familiar score made new. That, after all, is the only kind McGegan knows how to make.