Highlights of a classical music spring: A Mozart marathon, a new Wynton Marsalis symphony, and music among the trees

A curious thing happened while classical music organizations were busy worrying that their programming had grown too conservative. Since the pandemic, more or less, concert halls are full of new works, and audiences seem happy.

Part of this is a function of there being much less interest among composers in stylistic dogma. Film scores, genre-bending chamber music and opera, and works commentating on forces like social justice or climate change have upped the relatability factor. And no one much sticks their nose in the air if the musical language doesn’t adhere to the ruling stylistic academy, because, well, there is none.

The days when a composer’s scores had to be a certain degree dissonant to get respect are gone.

Listeners are more sophisticated than ever. Premieres have become, if not routine, then at least an expected and vital part of the feedback loop among composer, ensemble, and community.

One note of concern: A lot of organizations are following the herd. Many of the same composers seem to be landing commissions, and it would be smart for ensembles to take more risk on names we’ve not heard before.

And what about Beethoven and Mozart? There is still plenty of representation from the canon this spring. Now, though, we are hearing the familiar more often in new contexts; with works old and new in dialogue, each making the other suddenly more urgent.

The woodwind quintet literature has never had a more powerful and sustained stimulant than Imani Winds, now closing in on three decades. The group itself has continued to regenerate, with just one original member now in its ranks: bassoonist Monica Ellis. What hasn’t changed is the virtuosic playing likely to strike listeners in this Philadelphia Chamber Music Society program that includes Valerie Coleman’s Red Clay & Mississippi Delta and Paquito D’Rivera’s A Little Cuban Waltz. pcmsconcerts.org, 215-569-8080.

“A friend of mine and I were on a hike and he found a piece of birchbark. And it was just particularly clear that it could be interpreted as a score.” So said composer Eve Beglarian, in 2023, describing the origins of A Murmur in the Trees, a Thoreau-ish work to be reprised by Network for New Music. The setting and scoring — 24 double basses playing outdoors — invites a sylvan conversation: “a sense of duetting with the insects and the birds and the wind in the trees,” as Beglarian put it. networkfornewmusic.org, 215-848-7647.

Nocturnes, barcarolles, an impromptu, and more make up this program by the specialist in — you guessed it — Chopin. Ohlsson brings a propulsive muscularity to this repertoire that’s always exciting, though it’s the pianist’s powers of introspection that lift Chopin to a level that might make non-Chopin-ites change their minds about the composer. pcmsconcerts.org, 215-569-8080.

Britten’s 1960 opera — incredibly inventive for both its otherworldly orchestrations and colorful vocal writing — gets a rare outing with students of the Curtis in a production directed by Sarah Ina Meyers and conducted by Curtis alum Vinay Parameswaran. curtis.edu, 215-893-1999.

No more stirring musical portrait of everything our country has struggled to be exists than this Copland symphony from 1944-46. The composer never suggested that it was specifically programmatic, but he didn’t need to. In his well-known American musical vernacular, Copland captured it all: optimism, ambition, humanity, and dignity, and the generous beneficence to which this country has often aspired, and sometimes achieved. The Philadelphia Orchestra performs it with German conductor and composer Matthias Pintscher on the podium. For anyone who doesn’t know this work, I won’t spoil the last-movement surprise that so beautifully takes our country from darkness into triumph. In a word, hope. philorch.org, 215-893-1999.

This new series of free, short afternoon performances of Bach cantatas continues with one of the composer’s most popular: Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, BWV 80. Performed by a quartet of vocal soloists and small instrumental ensemble. philadelphiabachcollective.org.

The pianist and music critic Charles Rosen called Mozart’s string quintets the composer’s “greatest achievement in chamber music.” In fact, there is a whole world of ideas and starkly different atmospheres that transcend the bounds of genre in these six works. Rarely, though, do you get to consider the entire collection in one fell swoop. Which makes this something of an event: the Brentano Quartet, joined by violist Hsin-Yun Huang, in all six complete string quintets in a special two-part afternoon concert. pcmsconcerts.org, 215-569-8080.

Traditionalists will rejoice at this program: Beethoven bagatelles and Schubert impromptus. The English pianist may be no revolutionary, but Cooper’s sensibility is distinctly her own — deeply expressive without being mawkish, and of crystalline tone. If these aren’t reason enough to make sure you’re in the hall for this concert, here’s one more: After Cooper’s current tour, the pianist, 76, plans to play London’s Wigmore Hall in February 2027 one last time, and then withdraw from concert life. pcmsconcerts.org, 215-569-8080.

There’s something appealingly dangerous about the idea that as of late February, the Philadelphia Orchestra still didn’t have a score from Wynton Marsalis for his Symphony No. 5. That’s how fresh this music will be when it arrives on stage. What we can surmise is that the new piece, commissioned by the orchestra, will speak to the moment. It is paired on a program with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, at whose premiere Beethoven said: “We are moved by nothing but pure patriotism and the joyful sacrifice of our powers for those who have sacrificed so much for us.” The emotional intent of Marsalis’ new work is as-yet unknown, but it already carries a subtitle with a punch: “Liberty.” Marin Alsop conducts. philorch.org, 215-893-1999.