Parlando: Finding the resonance

Since founding the chamber orchestra Parlando in 2019, conductor Ian Niederhoffer has built a reputation for concerts that come with a story. Juliette Barber caught up with him to talk about Parlando’s 2026–27 season, guest conducting, his expanding Story Notes venture, and a forthcoming recording inspired by the promise and betrayal of German-Jewish assimilation through music

You formed Parlando in 2019, straight out of Yale, where you’d already started your own orchestra. What made you want to do it all over again?

The orchestra I started at Yale ended up being a prototype for Parlando. I realised people were gravitating towards interesting repertoire once they were able to understand the context. It was the storytelling, the anecdotes, the little bit of context that let people find a way into pieces they’d never heard before. I saw the same thing with friends at concerts: give them a little information, and they engage with the music completely differently.

Shortly after I graduated, I was at the Järvi Conducting Academy in Tallinn and Pärnu, Estonia. Paavo Järvi told all of us that starting your own orchestra is really the way forward for young conductors now, as the traditional paths just don’t exist in the same way anymore. I’d already formed an orchestra once at Yale, so I thought: great, I’ll do it again.

What I realised, when founding Parlando in 2019, was that it couldn’t just be another pickup group in New York – it needed to set itself apart. The storytelling element from Yale was the thing that had really engaged audiences, and that became the building block for everything Parlando is.

The 2026–27 season opens with a live-scored screening of Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City without Jews), a 1924 film that was nearly lost to history. Tell me about the decision to open with that.

We’ve been doing a movie project once a summer at the United Theatre in Rhode Island, and I’m genuinely excited to be performing Olga Neuwirth’s 2018 score to Die Stadt ohne Juden in New York. Movie concerts have become such a fundamental pillar of American orchestral programming over the last few seasons, everywhere, really. I think that’s fantastic, but there’s a real question of how you keep them artistically engaging rather than leaning purely into the popular angle. I love Star Wars and Indiana Jones as much as anyone, but there are so many other brilliant film scores worth exploring.

We performed Shostakovich’s score to The New Babylon (1929) during our 2023–24 season, and it’s not a coincidence that both that film and Die Stadt ohne Juden are political in the sense that they describe the world around them. Transporting an audience into the 1920s and putting that moment in front of them has real power. I’m not trying to project a message on top of it – I’m just trying to share why I feel compelled by something and let the audience have their own reaction. That’s the interesting part to me. 

 When I was starting Parlando, I had a conversation with the composer David Lang, and he told me: if it’s a piece your audience doesn’t know, it has to be doubly good. You can’t just programme unfamiliar music – it has to earn its place. I spend a lot of time listening to music nobody programmes, but when I find something where the orchestration is right, the theme is right, and it just grabs me – that’s when I know I need to programme it.

One of Parlando’s programmes this season pairs Schnittke’s Gogol Suite with Zappa’s The Adventures of Greggery Peccary, under the title “Zappa Files His Taxes”. How did that pairing come about?

Schnittke’s Gogol Suite is fascinating – there are these allusions to Beethoven running through it, it’s very dark, and then there’s this incredible Ukrainian folk song at the end. So much pathos, and it’s sardonic and satirical in a way people would usually associate with Shostakovich, but it’s something more than that. It was written in 1980, and it feels even more contemporary and vital now. I came to the pairing in a fairly oblique way.

Around the same time I found the Schnittke, my old high school English teacher sent me an article about Frank Zappa, and I started looking through his orchestral music and found The Adventures of Greggery Peccary. It’s about a pig who works in a factory and ends up inventing the calendar, basically taking aim at corporate bureaucracy. It reminded me of the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which brought me back to the Gogol Suite. When I looked at the orchestrations, they almost matched perfectly, and I thought: this is a programme.

That’s really the process for me. I find things where there’s some sort of resonance, and once it clicks, I can’t get my mind off it – I’ve just have to share it with audiences.

That same instinct for guiding an audience towards something unfamiliar seems to be at the heart of the “Chili Pepper System”, where you give pieces a “spice” rating based on listening difficulty. Where did the idea come from? 

It’s become a real point of connection with our audience – people ask me before almost every concert how many “peppers” (they’re quavers listed next to the piece in the programme) a piece is getting. It started as a way of setting expectations, really: the way you know, walking into an abstract expressionist exhibition, that you’re not going to see bowls of fruit. That doesn’t mean you won’t like it – you’re just a bit more open-minded and ready to engage with it differently. The “Chili Pepper System” does the same job as a piece’s timing or its date of composition in a programme note.

I’m aware it’s about as far from an objective system as you can get, and I get questioned about it after almost every concert as to why I’ve rated it how it is. It’s been a little divisive: some people find it too tongue-in-cheek, and when they disagree with a rating, they usually feel strongly enough about the piece that I can’t really argue. But any pushback, or any excitement about it, tells me people are genuinely engaging with the music rather than letting it wash over them. I mean, how many times have you arrived at a concert a bit late, not had time to read the programme notes before the lights go down, passively let the eight-minute contemporary concert opener wash over you, and only substantively engage with the piece when you read the programme note at the interval? It’s hard to engage with unfamiliar music with no context. I’ve had plenty of audience members who never would have engaged with a piece otherwise tell me how much they love it.

It sounds like the Parlando audience is highly engaged.

Parlando is very much a New York organisation – it’s grown out of a specific New York audience, and I’ve built the programming around what that audience responds to. Once people come to a Parlando concert, they tend to come back – we have a very high retention rate, and we do a reception after every concert where I get to hear directly how people connect what we’re doing to earlier programmes. We ran a two-season cabaret collaboration with the soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, tracing how cabaret shifted from social satire in Paris and Berlin to a vehicle for personal storytelling in New York, and audiences waited a whole season for the second half of that story.

This season, we’re also looking to move to pay-what-you-can ticketing. It fits our mission, and it’s part of a broader shift in the US – Opera Philadelphia and the Lincoln Center Festival Orchestra have done it, among others.

Parlando’s debut album, Censored Anthems (DELOS, February 2025), was an exploration of music as a tool of cultural resilience in the face of 20th-century censorship, particularly in the Soviet Union, featuring Weinberg, Mirzoyan and Shostakovich. Is there a particular theme to Parlando’s upcoming album?

We recorded our next album, The Broken Promise, in October 2025. I’d been reading Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo, and I was taken by how deeply classical music was bound up with German Jews trying to assimilate – the belief that if you fully adopted this culture, fully contributed to it, you’d be accepted. Felix Mendelssohn is the quintessential story: the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, who was such an advocate for Jewish emancipation and integration into German society, and Felix went on to bring Bach back into the German canon and make an enormous contribution as a composer, conductor and musicologist – only for his own statue to be torn down by the Nazis decades later.

So many of these artists carried that same optimism, which is why the recording includes Mendelssohn, alongside Richard Strauss and Franz Schreker, who’s always been a fixation of mine. He’s such an incredible composer – if you love Hollywood film music, it’s impossible to listen to Schreker and not hear the early seeds of that sound.

My broader goal with any programme is to connect this incredible musical tradition to the present by asking how music from the past can inform where we are now. I often think of Clifford Geertz who said, “Culture is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.” There’s the recent release of Chrisopher Nolan’s Odyssey, there’s a Dostoevsky revival happening online – there’s clearly a societal appetite for our past informing our present, and I don’t see why classical music can’t do exactly the same thing.

Tell me about Story Notes, the storytelling format you’ve developed for when you’re guest conducting elsewhere.

Story Notes is a type of programme I offer orchestras as a guest conductor. It’s about building a dramatic arc across an entire programme – the idea that a classical concert should feel the way a piece of theatre does, where you walk in, you hear the overture, and you leave changed, the way you might after a film. Every programme is designed and customised for different audiences, whether it’s the origins of movie music, classical music and comedy, censorship of music, and so on. There are a million stories that can be told through these programmes.

To give a non-Story Notes example of the same idea, I was invited to conduct a summer concert with the Virginia Symphony recently that mixed Broadway show tunes with military music. I was asked to speak in between pieces, and the connecting thread I found was Irving Berlin – how he essentially lived the plot of Fiddler on the Roof, fleeing Ukraine as a child, arriving in America, and going on to write camp songs for the US military in the First World War, including his first show, Yip Yip Yaphank. The last song he wrote for that show, he ended up cutting – then repurposed it for the Second World War instead. It was God Bless America. That story was built specifically for a Virginia audience, and it wouldn’t have worked as well in New York, where there’s a much smaller military presence. Storytelling is universal, but what makes it powerful is tailoring it to whoever you’re trying to reach.

How does Story Notes actually fit into how an orchestra structures its season?

I think of it as sitting between a subscription concert and an educational concert. If you’re trying to move an audience from one programming silo into another, this is a way to do it: you get the serious artistic engagement of a subscription concert, combined with the audience-building of an education or pops concert. In my experience, those two audiences are hard to bring together, so Story Notes is designed to bridge that gap. 

Do you find that working with other orchestras turns up discoveries too, such as pieces or composers you might not otherwise have found?

Whenever I go somewhere new, I feel like I come away with something. I was in Armenia in 2021 for the Khachaturian Competition, and I talked to an audience member about the composer Edvard Mirzoyan – I already knew his symphony, my conducting teacher had introduced me to it, but everyone there just said, “Of course, Mirzoyan” – though nobody outside Armenia really knows his music. I thought the symphony was incredible, so I brought it to Merkin Hall with Parlando the following season and recorded it that year. In the process, I ended up meeting his granddaughter, who it turned out was living in New York.

Then this May, I was in Chile with the National Symphony, and they’d programmed El Pájaro Burlón by Acario Cotapos – considered one of the most significant pieces in Chilean classical music, though I didn’t know anything about him beforehand. The title translates as “the mockingbird”, and I remember thinking the music doesn’t sound anything like a mockingbird – until I learned it was actually his own nickname, tied to the political turmoil of his life. I never would have known any of that if I’d just taken the piece at face value.

That’s really it for me. It’s less about wanting to instruct an audience in some specific way, and more that when I find something that genuinely moves me, I want to share it with as many people as possible.