CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Krannert Center for the Performing Arts will open its 2025-26 season Sept. 4-6 with ELLNORA: The Guitar Festival, the 11th year of the biennial festival. The performing arts center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign held its first ELLNORA festival 20 years ago.
Tickets for ELLNORA events and for the season’s performances will go on sale to the public at 10 a.m. Aug. 13 at krannertcenter.com.
The featured performers at ELLNORA include singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, who has a retrospective of her career currently on view at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville and a new best-of collection of recordings out; Grammy Award-winner Jeff Tweedy, best known as the guitarist and lead singer for the band Wilco, who is returning to Krannert Center after performing at the 2017 ELLNORA festival; blues artist Samatha Fish, returning to ELLNORA after playing with The Rolling Stones in 2024; Grammy Award-winner Gary Clark Jr., who performs blues, rock and soul with elements of hip hop; flamenco guitarist and composer Daniel Casares; and Strings for Peace, starring Grammy Award-winning guitarist Sharon Isbin returning to ELLNORA with the celebrated Indian classical musician and sarod virtuoso Amjad Ali Khan.
The opening night of ELLNORA on Sept. 4 features four free shows, including two teenage talents, blues and funk guitarist Grace Bowers and jazz artist Marel Hidalgo; Bertha: Grateful Drag, a drag tribute to the Grateful Dead; and The Messthetics, an instrumental trio performing with acclaimed saxophonist James Brandon Lewis.
The regular season features both well-known artists and up-and-coming talents. The former includes renowned jazz musician Herbie Hancock, who is the recipient of 14 Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and Kennedy Center Honor.
Atlas Maior, a group combining progressive jazz and world music from Middle Eastern, Latin American and Indian music traditions, incorporates traditional instruments including the Indian tabla, Middle Eastern dumbek and Peruvian cajón.
The chamber orchestra Sphinx Virtuosi has performed with major American orchestras and collaborated with artists such as Terence Blanchard, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Beyoncé and Jay-Z. The group will perform with cellist Sterling Elliott as part of next season’s Great Hall Series.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra returns for its annual residency, a relationship that Krannert Center director Mike Ross said is unmatched in higher education institutions across the country.
Guitarist Kaki King will present a multimedia show in which she uses projection mapping to produce images on her guitar as she plays. A computer translates the music to light so that King’s playing affects the brightness and colors of the projection, essentially using her guitar to paint. Her Krannert Center show “BUGS” shares a story filled with bugs and beetles for young audiences.
The baroque music ensemble Les Arts Florissants, playing period instruments, will perform Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” in celebration of its 300th anniversary. The concert features violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte.
Percussionist and first-generation Indian American Sunny Jain combines jazz, Indian rhythms, Bollywood music and Western guitar licks in his album “Wild, Wild East.” He’ll perform music that reimagines American ideas of Western expansion, cowboys and new beginnings as the story of immigrants.
The spring season opens with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the United Kingdom’s most in-demand orchestra, on Jan. 29. In a tribute to composer Philip Glass, 10 pianists will perform his 20 Piano Etudes on Feb. 6. A chamber music concert by the Balourdet Quartet will include the composition “Galaxy Back to You,” which incorporated artificial intelligence in organizing the work.
Saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and trumpet player Terence Blanchard will play the music of legendary jazz musicians John Coltrane (Ravi’s father) and Miles Davis as a centennial tribute of their births.
Grammy Award-winning violinist Joshua Bell is returning to Krannert Center to perform with his wife, soprano Larisa Martinez, in “Voice and the Violin.” The program includes classical music, opera and musical theater.
Jazz bassist and composer Stephan Crump is bringing his “Slow Water” musical project to Krannert Center for an Earth Day concert. Crump, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, who grew up along the Mississippi River, formed a sextet to perform music inspired by science, nature and the idea of redefining how we live with water.
Folk musician Rhiannon Giddens is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, a two-time Grammy Award winner, the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and the artistic director of Silkroad Ensemble, founded by Yo-Yo Ma. Giddens is a founding member of the Black string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, and she released a new album of fiddle and banjo music in April in collaboration with her former Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Justin Robinson. She’ll be at Krannert Center April 22.
The season’s dance performances include the GALLIM dance company, which will spend a week on campus developing its new work “Mother” before performing it in a world premiere on Sept. 27. Illinois dance alumni Leslie Cuyjet and Angie Pittman will perform Oct. 17-18. Cuyjet, who was just awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship, will perform a piece from “For All Your Life,” a project that examines the mechanism of life insurance and the value of Black life. Bessie Award-winning choreographer Hope Boykin will have a residency at Illinois, working with dance students who will perform “The Other Side,” adapted from the book by Jacqueline Woodson about young girls whose friendship crosses racial lines and their town’s segregated neighborhoods.
The Australian theater company Pony Cam will bring their show “Burnout Paradise,” in which they try to complete an escalating series of challenges while on treadmills. Bang on a Can and the Los Angeles Master Chorale will perform Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang’s work “before and after nature,” which explores how people interact with the natural world. Krannert Center was one of the commissioners of the project. Cirque Kalabanté incorporates West African music and dance with circus.
The season will include a series of performances by Jupiter String Quartet and Sinfonia da Camera, as well as performances of Illinois’ theatre, Lyric Theatre and dance programs.
A full schedule of the 2025-26 season performances is online at krannertcenter.com.
Editor’s notes: More information about Krannert Center for the Performing Arts’ entire 2025-26 season is available online. For information, contact Sean Kutzko at sekutzko@illinois.edu.
