35 Years, One Community
When Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale presented Nicholas McGegan with a Lifetime Achievement Award this spring, the room was filled with musicians and audience members who have been part of his musical life for decades. Two of the singers on stage, Nicholas Phan and Sherazade Pantaki, are collaborators of more than twenty years. Several instrumentalists have played alongside him for over thirty. And in the audience sat subscribers who have been attending concerts since before McGegan arrived in 1985. The evening also brought a proclamation from the City of Berkeley, honoring McGegan's impact not only on music but on the community itself.
Photo credit: Drew Altizer Photography
A Community Built Over 35 Years
In his 35 years leading Philharmonia Baroque, McGegan built something far larger than a performing ensemble. He has been making music in the Bay Area since 1985, and the relationships that grew around the orchestra have become inseparable from the music itself. Audience members recognize him at the supermarket and in restaurants around Berkeley. Subscribers who started coming to concerts in the 1980s have become friends whose children and grandchildren he now knows by name. At the gala, that continuity was visible in every corner of the room.
Now, as Music Director Emeritus, McGegan has handed off the administrative duties of the directorship, while keeping his deep musical relationship with the ensemble. He will return regularly for concerts with PBO and maintains a warm working friendship with his successor.
Photo credit: Drew Altizer Photography
Seattle Symphony: An All-Mendelssohn Program
McGegan returned to the Seattle Symphony this spring for a program devoted entirely to Mendelssohn: the concert overture The Fair Melusine, the Three Motets, Op. 39 in McGegan's own orchestral arrangement, and the complete incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream with actors performing Shakespeare's dialogue alongside the orchestra. Thomas May, writing in Memeteria, called it "a hugely enjoyable and inventive performance."
The motets carry a remarkable origin story: Mendelssohn wrote them after hearing a choir of nuns singing from behind a screen in a church atop Rome's Spanish Steps. McGegan's orchestration replaces the organ with orchestral forces, adding color to its luminous foundation. Bachtrack's Erica Miner praised the result, noting that McGegan captured Mendelssohn's melodic sensibilities “with a sensitive interpretation and expressive gestures.”
Photo credit: Jorge Gustavo Elias
A Season of Range
The 2025-26 season took McGegan across an extraordinary span of repertoire and geography. Four weeks of Messiah with symphony orchestras from Milwaukee and St. Louis to Tucson and Kansas City. Elgar's First Symphony in Indianapolis. Brahms' Requiem in Amarillo, Texas, in a debut performance for McGegan. And extended residencies at Yale, Juilliard, and Indiana University. The breadth of the season's programming extended well beyond the Baroque and Classical repertoire for which McGegan is best known. Few conductors move as comfortably between an Elgar symphony and a Bach cantata, a conservatory coaching session and a symphony podium.
What Nic is Exploring: St. Matthew Passion
The St. Matthew Passion recording with Cantata Collective and AVIE Records arrived this spring, the most ambitious installment yet in an ongoing Bach series that has already produced the St. John Passion, Mass in B Minor, Easter Oratorio, and Magnificat. For this project, the ensemble used a hybrid approach: recording throughout a full week of rehearsals, then performing the work live for an audience at the end of the week, with that concert captured as well. The result draws on the polish of sustained studio work and the energy of a live performance.
Every musician and singer in the room was someone McGegan has worked with before, some for decades. That familiarity shaped the recording in ways no single rehearsal could. The result, according to INFODAD , is a performance of "absolutely first-rate direction" and "an exceptionally clear-headed and clearly sung St. Matthew Passion."
The St. Matthew Passion is available now on AVIE Records. Listen to the latest installment in McGegan's landmark Bach series with Cantata Collective. Listen here.
Upcoming Appearances
June 5 & June 7, 2026
St. John Passion with Cantata Collective, under the auspices of the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition, featuring the Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble
June 13, 2026
The Masters in Concert at Sarasota Music Festival
July 10
Beethoven, Mozart and Handel at Aspen Music Festival