Spring is the time for new things and as the Dallas Chamber Symphony prepares for its May 19 concert at the Moody Performance Hall in the Dallas Arts District, the orchestra announced its new season. The May 19 features Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in E minor. “I love Brahms symphonies, and I wa nt to program them on a regular basis. It’s a shame there are only four of them. This one, we actually performed in our very first season. And so, we’ve performed all the Brahms symphonies now, but this will be our ensemble’s second performance of it. And the ensemble’s just grown so much. My expectation is this performance is going to be something very special, just a great way to measure our development over the years from where we started,” said Richard McKay, Dallas Chamber Symphony’s Music and Artistic Director. The concert also includes Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Chausson’s Poème. “All the pieces on May’s program were basically composed within, I want to say, 11 years or so. In a very short period of time, so all very contemporary. The Chausson is very dramatic virtuosic work, very Austro-German sound. Very chromatic and dramatic,” McKay said. Laurel Gagnon won the top prize at the 2025 Dallas International Violin Competition. Laurel Gagnon, winner of the 2025 Dallas International Violin Competition, is the soloist for Chausson’s Poème. “She played the Brahms at the competition so she will be playing within a very similar harmonic language. She’s got an extremely big sound for her instrument, a lot of color. She’s a very powerful player. So, I think that’s what you need on a piece like that with such a large orchestration. It’s a tricky piece, actually. There are a lot of transitions and there’s a lot of potential in that work to really invent it or reinvent it for oneself,” McKay said. “She said it was a piece that she had looked at many years ago and was trying to find an excuse to dust it off and learn it again and so I think she was happy with it once we decided on it.” The 2026-2027 season begins with a film-in-concert event, but this is not one of Dallas Chamber Symphony’s silent film scores. The film is Deep in the Heart II, a documentary from Ben Masters with a score by Noah Sorota and narration by Ethan Hawke. The concert is on Sept. 22, two days before the film’s theatrical debut. “We are recording this film score in June of this year. So, it is the music that will be synchronized to this new documentary film by Ben Masters. It’s a documentary on Texas rivers,” McKay said. “And then what we’re doing with this premiere on Sept. 22 is we’re going to perform the score live to the new documentary. So, it’s an advanced preview of the film with live orchestra. The director will be there; the composer will be there. It’s going to be a fun night.” Eunghee Cho will be featured during Dallas Chamber Symphony’s October 20 concert. The October 20 concert features Eunghee Cho, the orchestra’s principal cellist as the soloist for Saint-Saën’s Cello Concerto No. 1, Kodály’s Summer Evening, and Haydn’s Symphony No. 104, “London”. “It’s great and then the Kodály’s Summer Evening it’s a tone poem really gorgeous and its language fits really nicely with the Saint-Saën’s cello concerto so really beautiful program,” McKay said. Violinist Nancy Zhou will perform Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor on February 9. The program also includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1. “She’s playing the Mendelssohn, very popular standard concerto, which our orchestra has never performed before. So, it would be new to us, new to our audience, but very much an audience favorite. And she’s a wonderful violinist,” McKay said. Violinist Nancy Zhou will perform with the Dallas Chamber Symphony on Feb. 9. The concert on March 30 is another opportunity to explore Haydn’s range with his Violin Concerto No. 1 performed by YooJin Jang. “Haydn is one of these composers who spans genres or spans musical periods. His early works were very Baroque in sound because that’s what was being written. But he lived so long, he was writing music well after Mozart. So, he was writing music before Mozart and writing music after Mozart,” McKay said. ”Later on, he sounds Mozartian and even maybe Beethovenian at times. So, this tremendous transformation occurred during his career. You get a couple of looks at Haydn this season with his late symphony, with the first concert, and then with this earlier violin concerto, which features string ensemble and harpsichord. So very, very different looks at Haydn on very broadly separate ends of the spectrum for him.” The concert also includes Britten’s Simple Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence.  “It’s a work for strings of themes written by the composer when he was very young. And it’s actually modeled off for some Baroque dances so that’s just a nice little tie-in to the Haydn,” McKay said. “And then that finishes up with Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence. So, first half kind of Baroque and violin, and second half very romantic, and it’ll get a passionate account.” Yoojin Jang will perform with the Dallas Chamber Symphony on March 30. On May 11, the orchestra will perform a piano concerto with the winner of the 2026 Dallas International Piano Competition and Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, “Jupiter”. “It’s performed a lot, but it’s such a great symphony. It’s just such a great one. It’s hard not to be in a wonderful and professional mood when you hear that final movement of that symphony. It’s just so joyful. Remarkably, it could be so joyful for a man who, when he wrote it, was struggling. But it’s so, so beautiful. So amazing. So contrapuntal. And complicated,” McKay said. The orchestra will host the finals of the Dallas International Violin Competition on June 22. Three finalists will perform a concerto with the orchestra, a renowned jury will select a winner,  and the audience will get to vote for their favorite, too. The finals, like the rest of the 2026-2027 season, will be performed at the Moody Performance Hall in the Dallas Arts District. Beyond its own season, Dallas Chamber Symphony is collaborating with the Turtle Creek Chorale for its Sept. 16 concert, Better Is Peace: 9/11 Remembered Through Song and Dance at the Meyerson Symphony Center and Avant Chamber Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker, running Nov. 28 to Dec. 6 at the Moody Performance Hall. “It plays to our strength. I mean, chamber orchestras tend to be great collaborators. They are cost-effective collaborators, which is important for most arts groups. But the quality of our group is such that people want to work with us and that’s very exciting. It’s also great to get in front of these other audiences. There are plenty of people in the audience at Turtle Creek Chorale or even at Avant Chamber Ballet performances who might not be aware that we exist and how nice it is to be working alongside those groups and to get that kind of exposure,” McKay said. Learn more: Dallas Chamber Symphony ...read more read less