If Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra’s incoming Music Director Peter Whelan wanted to make a splash with his first season, he has succeeded. Last Thursday’s announcement of the early music group’s 2026-2027 season leans heavily on costly, big works that draw attention.
The go-for-broke mentality begins on July 23-24, when the orchestra presents a special production of Handel’s opera Tolomeo, re d’Egitto (Ptolemy, king of Egypt). With countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen in the title role, Whelan conducting, and James Darrah Black directing, it’s a bold bid for attention in a crowded summer season week.
The season’s Handelthon continues: Whelan conducts the orchestra and Philharmonia Chorale in the oratorio Alexander’s Feast (The Power of Music) on Nov. 11-14, starring Philharmonia Baroque stalwart Sherezade Panthaki. The work is a variant of the version first performed by Handel in Dublin in 1742. The score was reconstructed by Whelan and Handel specialist Donald Burrows, and premiered by Whelan with his Irish Baroque Orchestra last year at the Dublin HandelFest before a performance at the BBC Proms. This set of concerts will be its U.S. premiere.
In December, Patrick Dupré Quigley steps in to conduct the West Coast premiere of a newly rediscovered work by Marianna Martines, a well-regarded contemporary of Mozart. Other works on the program include Georg Philipp Telemann’s playful Burlesque de Quixotte, Handel’s “Let the Bright Seraphim,” and J.S. Bach’s Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen.
The classics aren’t the only thing Philharmonia Baroque will offer in the next season. Come January 30, 2027, the next installment of its informal Sessions series arrives. Co-produced with The Freight in Berkeley, it features Cairo-born, eight-time ARIA Award winner Joseph Tawadros. He is one of the world’s leading masters of the oud — the Arabic fretless lute. A week later, Tawadros solos in a new concerto by the orchestra’s composer-in-residence Tarik O’Regan. Also on that program is Vivaldi’s overture to his opera Olimpiade and concertos from his famous publication L’estro armonico.
Violinist Rachell Ellen Wong curates and leads the March 4-6, 2027 concerts, which she has titled “Baroque on Stage.” Theater music by Henry Purcell and Jean-Philippe Rameau gets things off to a rousing start followed by a dramatic symphony by C.P.E Bach and Vivaldi’s Concerto in E Minor, RV 273.
Whelan returns to lead the orchestra and Chorale in the grand finale, Joseph Haydn’s The Creation (April 9-11, 2027). The top-drawer soloists are Lucy Crowe, Nicholas Phan, and Enrico Lagasca. As a pendant, violinist Alexi Kenney joints scholar-in-residence Francesco Spagnolo for the second Philharmonia Sessions concert focusing on the Mendelssohn family’s connection to the music of J.S. Bach.
Some things have been streamlined away: gone are the orchestra’s forays into 19th-century repertoire, which were never among its strongest performances. But with the world premiere of an oud concerto, plus two famous oratorios and an opera, the orchestra will be rattling the rafters anyway.
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