The 2024 Fall Arts Preview: Our picks in music

This fall, the Symphony delivers music never before performed in Atlanta, and a music tribute to railroad laborers goes onstage at the Schwartz Center.

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The Atlanta Opera’s 2024-25 season opens September 18 with its innovative Bohème Project, alternating Puccini’s 1896 La Bohème with Jonathan Larson’s gritty 1994 adaptation of the same story, Rent. Though a sharp contrast in styles — one a lyrical opera favorite the other a hard-charging Broadway blockbuster — both celebrate love, art and freedom against the backdrop of a pandemic. Having presented a traditional Bohème last season, the company is premiering a modern-day version set during the Covid pandemic. Rent, meanwhile, is set amid the 1990s HIV/AIDS crisis in New York City. Both works will be performed in immersive fashion on the same set at Pullman Yards. Perennial favorite The Magic Flute by Mozart follows on November 5 through November 10, with a colorful set, fanciful puppets and stratospheric high notes at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre.

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The musical ensemble Silkroad brings its American Railroad to the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts on November 16. Subtitled “A Musical Journey of Reclamation,” the evening will honor the indigenous and African Americans and immigrant laborers who toiled on the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad but whose contributions have been largely erased from history. The program will include commissioned pieces by jazz artist Cécile McLorin Salvant, as well as re-envisioned arrangements of folk songs by Artistic Director Rhiannon Giddens. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma founded the ensemble in 1998 to promote a musical multicultural exchange. Giddens was named artistic director in 2020. A Pulitzer Prize winner for the opera Omar, Giddens first became known as a founding member of the bluegrass ensemble the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

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The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s fall season kicks off September 19 and September 21 with Nathalie Stutzmann conducting Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. The following week, September 26 and September 27, she’ll lead the orchestra in Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn), a compilation of Germanic folk songs that profoundly impacted the history of classical music. To create this work, Mahler drew from the Romantic poetry collection of the same name. The ASO will play the complete song cycle, which has never been heard in its entirety in Atlanta. Two rising stars, mezzo soprano Fleur Barron and baritone Samuel Hasselhorn, will be featured.

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More Music Highlights . . .

• Atlanta’s own African American Orchestra Noir, led by composer Jason Ikeem Rodgers, brings its Y2k Meets ‘90s tour to The Tabernacle on September 7.
• Jazz vocalist Kathleen Bertrand performs at Art Farm at Serenbe on September 13.
• Cellist Roee Harrán will perform four Bach cello suites at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts on September 7.
• Georgian Chamber Players will be at Eddie’s Attic on October 15.
• Hometown superstar Usher will perform at State Farm Arena on October 17, October 18 and October 20.
• Sting 3.0 will be at Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre on October 22.
• Georgia native Roderick Cox returns to the ASO October 24 through October 26 to conduct a program that includes excerpts from John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic, about J. Robert Oppenheimer.
• On October 26, the all-women, Grammy-winning jazz quartet säje will be at the Rialto Center for the Arts.
• Another Grammy winner, classical pianist Michelle Cann, makes her Spivey Hall debut on November 10.
• Rap god and flute maven André 3000 will perform November 14 at the Fox Theatre.

More 2024 Fall Picks