Introducing the 24/25 Season

By UMS

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The Power of Together.

In the world of the performing arts, there are no dividing lines, but the shared rhythms and expressions of the human experience. Welcome to UMS’s 146th season.

Explore All 24/25 Events

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or browse season highlights below

For Our Patrons & Season Ticketholders

24/25 Season Ticket packages are on sale now! Learn more or flip through our interactive season brochure.

Individual event tickets go on sale Tuesday, August 1.

For the Press

View Full Press Release (PDF)

Season Highlights:

Opening Week: You Decide the Winner

Fight Night by Ontroerend Goed

The 24/25 season opens with Ontroerend Goed’s Fight Night, a powerful, non-partisan theater work that speaks volumes about our current moment, human nature, and the coming election. Using a boxing ring as a metaphor for a political contest in a fun, yet thought-provoking, experience, Fight Night is part reality show, part arch commentary, and part provocation for all of us as voters and participants in our political process. (Wed-Sun, Sep 25-29, 2024)

Piano Phenoms

Isata Kanneh-Mason, Seong-Jin Cho, and Yunchan Lim

The 24/25 Choral Union Series includes three UMS solo recital debuts by a new generation of dynamic pianists who are taking the musical world by storm:

• Isata Kanneh-Mason opens the Choral Union series with a wide-ranging and eclectic recital program with works composed over a 168-year period by Austrian, German, Danish, Russian, and Polish composers (Thu, Oct 10, 2024)
• Seong-Jin Cho celebrates Ravel’s 150th birthday with a concert featuring the composer’s complete solo piano works — a monumental undertaking that will be performed in only a few select cities in 2025 (Fri, Feb 7, 2025)
• Yunchan Lim, the youngest musician to win the Van Cliburn Competition, closes the Choral Union Series in a program featuring Bach’s Goldberg Variations (Wed, Apr 23, 2025)

The Berliner Philharmoniker Returns

Hilary Hahn and Kirill Petrenko

UMS is thrilled to welcome the Berliner Philharmoniker and chief conductor Kirill Petrenko back to Hill Auditorium in two different programs:

• In her first Ann Arbor appearance in two decades, violinist Hilary Hahn joins the Berliner Philharmoniker in Korngold’s heart-tugging violin concerto, alongside works by Rachmaninoff and Dvořák (Sat, Nov 23, 2024)
• Kirill Petrenko leads the Berliner Philharmoniker in his interpretation of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5 (Sun, Nov 24, 2024)

Plus More Extraordinary Violinists

Anne-Sophie Mutter

The Choral Union Series showcases three additional outstanding violin soloists in the 24/25 Season:

• Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja makes her UMS debut with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and principal conductor Edward Gardner (Fri, Oct 18, 2024)
• Anne-Sophie Mutter performs her first UMS recital since 2013, featuring her longtime collaborator, pianist Lambert Orkis (Fri, Apr 4, 2025)
• Théotime Langlois de Swarte joins the early music ensemble Les Arts Florissants to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (Wed, Apr 9, 2025)

Provocative Theater

Ulysses by Elevator Repair Service

After our opening week of Fight Night, a robust theater lineup continues across campus for the entire 24/25 Season:

• Seven performers of Elevator Repair Service present an eclectic sampling from James Joyce’s life-affirming masterpiece Ulysses, chronicling the experiences of three Dubliners on a single ordinary day in June 1904 (Sat-Sun, Oct 19-20, 2024)
• Natalie Palamides presents Nate — A One Man Show, which won wide acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2018 before Amy Poehler produced it as a Netflix special (Wed-Sun, Feb 5-9, 2025)
• Peeping Tom blurs the lines between theater and dance in TRIPTYCH, a three-part dance-theater work that plunges the audience into a man’s mind within a labyrinth of missing doors, lost rooms, and hidden floors (Fri-Sat, Mar 28-29, 2025)
• Additional No Safety Net theater programming and contextual events will be announced later this year

Groundbreaking Dance

Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan

Our 24/25 Dance and Dance-Theater Combined Series include:

• Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan returns to Ann Arbor for the first time since 2011 under the artistic direction of Cheng Tsung-lung, whose work 13 Tongues recalls his mother’s stories about a legendary street artist in the 1960s (Sat-Sun, Oct 26-27, 2024)
• Shamel Pitts and his arts collective TRIBE present BLACK HOLE, in which three Black dancers share the stage in a narrative of unity, vigor, and unrelenting advancement (Fri-Sat, Mar 14-15, 2025)
• In Peeping Tom’s TRIPTYCH, created with Nederlands Dans Theater, the audience becomes the witness…or perhaps the voyeur…of what usually remains hidden and unsaid, taken into subconscious worlds to discover nightmares, fears, and desires (Fri-Sat, Mar 28-29, 2025)

Jazz Greats

Etienne Charles

Our Jazz Series is back in full force in the 24/25 Season with a lineup of living legends:

• Genre-defying composer and drummer Tyshawn Sorey and his trio, including pianist Aaron Diehl and bass player Matt Brewer, perform pieces from his album Mesmerism, which showcases the joy of improvising over songs from the Great American Songbook (Sat, Nov 16, 2024)
• Musician, composer, and storyteller Etienne Charles presents Earth Tones, a multimedia jazz performance featuring original compositions that draw attention to people and regions affected by climate change (Fri-Sat, Jan 17-18, 2025)
• Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra return to Hill Auditorium to continue to honor the rich heritage of jazz while presenting a stunning variety of new works from illustrious names (Sat, Feb 1, 2025)
• Three-time Grammy Award-winning saxophonist Branford Marsalis makes his debut with the Branford Marsalis Quartet in the Michigan Theater (Wed, Feb 19, 2025)
• Kurt Elling brings his contemporary lyricism and vocal ingenuity in celebration of Weather Report, one of jazz’s great supergroups, alongside Weather Report alumnus Peter Erskine (Fri, Apr 11, 2025)

Illuminating Perspectives

Rhiannon Giddens

• Silkroad Ensemble’s American Railroad project illuminates the impact of the Transcontinental Railroad and westward expansion on the communities it displaced, featuring new arrangements by Rhiannon Giddens and other Silkroad musicians (Fri, Nov 8, 2024)
• Third Coast Percussion and Zakir Hussain share the stage for the first time as part of a collaborative concert presentation that blends the timbres of tabla with a classically trained percussion ensemble (Sun, Feb 23, 2025)
• La Santa Cecilia, fronted by singer La Marisoul, takes the stage in a family-friendly concert featuring opening artist Sonia De Los Santos (Sun, Mar 9, 2025)
• Legendary composer, singer, and oud master Marcel Khalife returns to Ann Arbor for the first time in 20 years, joined by his son, virtuoso pianist Rami Khalife, and his nephew, cellist Sary Khalife in a concert that celebrates their musical legacy (Sat, Apr 5, 2025)

Chamber Arts Debuts

Branford Marsalis, Liz Ames, and Timothy McAllister

The six-concert Chamber Arts Series features three exciting UMS debuts:

• The New York-based Escher Quartet performs Mendelssohn’s anguished last major composition and Dvořák’s joyful final string quartet, along with Bartók’s Quartet No. 2, following their full Bartók quartet cycle in New York this spring (Sun, Nov 10, 2024)
• Saxophonist Branford Marsalis brings his classical chops to Rackham Auditorium in a chamber music evening featuring two members of the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance community: saxophone professor Timothy McAllister and collaborative pianist Liz Ames (Fri, Feb 21, 2025)
• The Rosamunde String Quartet unites esteemed musicians from renowned ensembles such as the Berlin Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and Los Angeles Philharmonic (Wed, Mar 12, 2025)

One-of-a-Kind Collaborations

Joyce DiDonato and Kings Return

• The Ariel Quartet and cellist Alisa Weilerstein explore how folk music influences art music, with an uninterrupted suite of traditional folk music from around the world, along with pieces dating back to the origins of Western classical music (Thu, Dec 12, 2024)
• Charismatic a cappella quartet Kings Return has attracted millions of fans, including mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who invited the group to collaborate for a special holiday program (Sat, Dec 14, 2024)
• Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane embark on their first large-scale collaboration with a new UMS co-commission that is inspired by the magical realism of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’s 1939 short story, “The Library of Babel” (Thu, Jan 23, 2025)
• UMS presents Sergei Prokofiev’s 1938 Soviet historical drama, Alexander Nevsky, featuring the UMS Choral Union and the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra with conductor Scott Hanoian, performing the full score alongside the original film (Sat, Mar 22, 2025)

Annual Favorites

Takács Quartet

• Music director Scott Hanoian conducts the UMS Choral Union, four debuting vocal soloists, and the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra in Handel’s Messiah (Sat-Sun, Dec 7-8, 2024)
• The Takács Quartet celebrates its 50th anniversary with a program that pairs Haydn and Beethoven, two innovators of the string quartet form, with Benjamin Britten’s rarely-performed String Quartet No. 2 (Thu, Apr 24, 2025)

Discover all upcoming events at ums.org/season. Additional 24/25 Season programming — including School Day Performances, UMS Digital Presentations, and our Fall residency at the Ypsilanti Freighthouse — will be announced over the coming months.