Concert Reviews

The orchestra turned on a dime Wednesday, first accompanying Young Artists Competition winners and then expertly backing Ben Folds’s quirky piano pop.

Ben Folds with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Young Artists Competition winners at Symphony Hall, Boston, June 3, 2026.

“There are two kinds of cities,” Ben Folds told the Symphony Hall audience at one point during his show with the Boston Pops on Wednesday night. “One kind has an orchestra, and the other is crap.”

He admitted that he was being flip, but the underlying message — that any city willing to put time, resources, and support into an institution as glorious as the Boston Pops must have something going for it — would be hard to argue against. 

That’s especially true after watching Wednesday’s vibrant performance, which had almost literally everything (musically, anyway): pitch-perfect performances of orchestral pieces spanning 300 years, a showcase for some of the most talented young musicians you will ever see, and a thrilling synthesis of symphonic brilliance and Folds’s unique brand of offbeat, literate piano pop.

Young Artists Competition winners stun

Those young musicians — four high school students in Massachusetts who were the winners of the 2026 Fidelity Investments Young Artists Competition — began the show, and what a beginning. The Pops cleverly introduced the teens in a short video wherein you learn interesting facts about them (one eats a banana before every performance, for instance). Then when you meet them as they’re each introduced onto the stage, it feels like you’re seeing somebody famous. (There’s the banana kid!) And don’t worry, someday they will be.

If seeing these accomplished teens in the video wasn’t already making you question what you’ve done with your own life, their performances certainly did. Phillips Academy senior Ethan Liu actually composed the piece that he performed with the orchestra. He composed it!

First up was Walnut Hill School for the Arts senior Ruth Anne Sowa, of Medford (“She’s from Meffa,” conductor Keith Lockhart winked when introducing her), whose stunning soprano soared from the first moment of “Piangerò la sorte mia” from Handel’s Giulio Cesare and didn’t let up for more than seven minutes, gliding effortlessly through impressive trills and displaying a rich vibrato.

Winsor School sophomore Claire Park’s voice was equally expressive on “Una donna a quindici anni,” as was her attitude. In the video, she explained the concept behind the character singing the piece in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte — how she’s a teen giving younger girls cheeky dating advice — but even if she hadn’t, the sly, insouciant movements and facial expressions that accompanied her agile soprano vocals would have told the story.

Liu, the teen who composed his own piece, “Return to 老家 [Hometown],” played the saxophone with remarkable fluidity, clearly feeling every note. The orchestra quieted toward the close, Liu playing totally solo, adding evocative jazz flourishes under Lockhart’s watchful eye.

Then it was impossible to watch Phillips Academy pianist Shixun Song glide through the third movement from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, his light touch guiding the piece from quiet moments to frantic bursts, and not be amazed by his almost startling poise. (A feature all the young contest winners shared.)

While the orchestra’s other musicians are not necessarily the focal point of these pieces, on the Rachmaninoff movement in particular, their spectacular synergy also showed the power of the orchestra as a whole — and the way a talented soloist and crack ensemble can complement each other.

Each student was greeted by loud ovations from portions of the crowd that had clearly come to cheer them on — “A lot of baroque opera fans,” Lockhart quipped after Sowa’s performance received huge applause. And Folds, when he came on after the intermission, joined in, saying he was genuinely “humbled.” “I feel smaller playing after them,” he said.

Ben Folds commands the orchestra

The last time I saw Folds, he was sitting totally alone at his piano at The Cabot in Beverly, devising his setlist in real time from requests thrown at him on paper airplanes — and he seemed perfectly at ease. On Wednesday, Folds started the show standing, just feet from Keith Lockhart and his orchestra, and it was clearly a less comfortable position: He spent much of that first number fidgeting or with his hands in his pockets. Clearly, he’s a big nerd. (He would concur with this.)

The delicate “But Wait, There’s More,” a cautionary missive Folds wrote about the COVID-19 pandemic and the threat of a second Trump administration, served as a kind of warm-up, although it was clear right out of the gate just how stunning the Symphony Hall acoustics are, and how well Folds’s vocals mixed with the accompaniment. (Along with the background vocals provided by Tim Harrington and Paul Wright of the Boston indie-pop duo Tall Heights.)

But with “Capable of Anything,” a rollicking chamber rock song from Folds’s lush 2015 album “So There,” there was no denying the majesty that came along with the Pops’ contribution. And it seemed to elevate Folds’s performance — what was relaxed and matter-of-fact in his solo show seemed to have more urgency here, accompanied by Folds’s clear sense of delight at being surrounded by these other musicians.

It’s telling that most of the songs performed were from the more recent periods of Folds’s almost four-decade career — he’s approached his work with an increased complexity over the years, and even composed a Concerto for Piano and Orchestra that was commissioned by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra in 2014. Still, not all were necessarily natural fits: On “Cologne,” a song Fold says he “wrote on stage on drugs” (the kind for illness, not recreation), the orchestration felt more grafted on than intrinsic. And on certain others, like “Landed,” Folds had to work a little too hard to project his falsetto over the roar of the accompaniment. 

But most of the songs seemed like a perfect pairing with the orchestra’s adroitness for both grand flourishes and subtle, emotional turns. “Kristine from the 7th Grade” — a wry commentary on toxic online relationships with people you thought you knew — retained the song’s humor even as the Pops’ minor-key accompaniment imbued it with a sense of genuine menace. But then, when Folds asks the titular meme-thrower if she realizes “this world can be wonderful too,” you can hear the soft strum of a harp that sounds like parting clouds. It’s beautiful.

The orchestra provided a gorgeous gonzo overture to “Zak and Sara,” and the hilarious “Effington” was a late-show highlight, Paul Buckmaster’s driving arrangement bringing the (probably fictitious but should be real) town of Effington to brilliant life behind Folds’s lyrics. “I’ve got this movie in my mind of Effington, and the soundtrack to it sounds like this,” he sang, as a true soundtrack swelled up under him.

Folds, a naturally funny and engaging speaker, also didn’t skimp on his trademark stories: “This was in every way a Plan B,” he said at one point of his eclectic music career — he had originally hoped to be a professional timpanist. And later, he gave an impassioned speech imploring the audience to support the National Symphony Orchestra, which has fallen between the cracks of the mishegos facing its home, the Kennedy Center. (Lockhart, too, mentioned the center, accentuating its original name — no other name stuck onto the front — to thunderous applause.)

“People working together for the greater good — the only place you see that happen is on stage,” Folds said, calling it a “symbol of civilization.” And if the problems facing the NSO are any indication, he argued, civilization is in trouble. (More on Folds’s campaign to save the orchestra here.)

The encore, a sad and beautiful version of what is probably Folds’s most baldly sentimental song, “The Luckiest,” was perfect, the strings and woodwinds adding a tremulous undertone to his impassioned repetition of “I am … I am … I am … the luckiest.”  

What’s amazing to consider is that the Boston Pops Orchestra that perfectly accompanied Folds on Wednesday night is the same one that accompanied Broadway’s Leslie Odom, Jr. last month, and who would accompany art-rock auteur St. Vincent the very next night. In short, to paraphrase Folds, they are clearly capable of anything — and at a time, as Folds said, when it seems like “the world is going to absolute crap,” it’s comforting to know that an institution of this caliber still exists. How lucky are we?

Setlist for The Boston Pops with Ben Folds at Symphony Hall, June 3, 2026

Boston Pops with Young Artists Competition winners:

• “Piangero la sorte mia” from Giulio Cesare (Handel), with Ruth Anne Sowa, soprano
• “Una donna a quindici anni” from Cosi fan tutte (Mozart), with Claire Park, soprano
• Return to 老家 (Liu, arr./orch. Elliott), with Ethan Liu, saxophone
• Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, 3rd mvmt. (Rachmaninoff), with Shixun Song, piano

Ben Folds with Boston Pops:

• But Wait There’s More
• Capable of Anything
• Cologne 
• Kristine From the 7th Grade
• Zak and Sara
• Landed 
• Fragile
• Effington

Encore:

• The Luckiest

Peter Chianca

General Assignment Editor

Peter Chianca, Boston.com’s general assignment editor since 2019, is a longtime news editor, columnist, and music writer in the Greater Boston area.

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