NEW YORK (AP) — Renée Fleming and Béla Fleck, who both dropped out of Kennedy Center appearances after President Donald Trump took over the venue, will give a joint concert at Carnegie Hall as part of a 2026-27 season that also will include a Philip Glass symphony he withdrew from the National Symphony Orchestra.
The season also will feature the venue’s first complete performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
Fleming and Fleck will present an evening of Appalachian folk music on Dec. 3, Carnegie announced Thursday. Plans for the program began in 2025, before they withdrew last month from Kennedy Center appearances.
Fleming and Fleck also are scheduled to perform the program this May 23 at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, and are discussing other possible cities.
Gianandrea Noseda, whose National Symphony appears displaced by Trump abruptly shuttering the Kennedy Center for a two-year reconstruction, will lead the Zurich Opera orchestra in concert performances of the four-opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)” from March 18-23. The only previous Ring operas presented in their entirety at Carnegie have been “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre”
“It’s fantastic that with this project we will do something historically important,” Noseda said. ”Of course you miss the visual aspect but you can get probably more precise musical performances because everybody’s focused without movements, without costumes, without lighting.”
Noseda conducted staged Rings in 2024 at the Zurich Opera. He is music director there as well as with the NSO, which is searching for a space to play while the Kennedy Center is closed.
“We are working on it,” he said.
Glass’ Symphony No 15 “Lincoln” will be played by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s on Jan. 31. Commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra, it had been scheduled for its world premiere at the Kennedy Center on June 12 before Glass withdrew it last month, writing “the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the symphony.”
Carnegie Hall said the work will premiere elsewhere before the New York performance.
Carnegie’s season opens Oct. 8 with the Berlin Philharmonic, led by chief conductor Kirill Petrenko in a program featuring tenor Jonas Kaufmann.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin will conduct all nine of Mahler’s completed symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera orchestra. No. 8, known as "Symphony of a Thousand” will be performed three times from June 10-12, 2027, with a chorus of 350 and orchestra of 126, taking place at the Met rather than Carnegie.
