Music and Beyond 2026 – Ottawa, ON

Music and Beyond 2026: Two Weeks of Classical Music Across Ottawa

Dozens of concerts, eight venues, and a 200th-birthday soundtrack for the capital

📍 Get Directions Full Schedule

The King’s Singers, mandolin star Avi Avital, pianist Stewart Goodyear, and violinist Kerson Leong headline a festival that fills Ottawa’s churches and halls with music for two straight weeks — with a running thread of concerts marking the city’s 200th anniversary.

🎻 World-class soloists 🏛 Historic venues 🎊 Ottawa 200 programming 🇫🇷 Bilingual festival

💡 A festival pass pays for itself fast here — a Regular Pass ($160) covers every non-Premium concert for all fourteen days, and there’s music nearly every afternoon and evening.

Why Go Highlights Schedule Passes & Tickets Venues Essentials Getting There Tips FAQ

✨ Why This Festival Is Worth the Trip

Music and Beyond has been Ottawa’s big summer classical event since 2010, and it operates at a scale most Ontario festivals can’t touch — over 900 concerts and events in its first ten seasons alone. The idea, from founding artistic director Julian Armour, has always been to go “beyond” the standard recital: linking classical music with film, dance, history, visual art, and whatever else fits, in venues that range from a Neo-Byzantine sanctuary to a heritage village museum.

The 2026 edition has a story running through it: Ottawa turns 200 this year, and the festival leans in hard. It opens with a gala celebrating the city, then threads bicentennial programming through both weeks — concerts of music from 1826, a program recreating the sounds of early Bytown, and a two-part survey of 200 years of music in the capital.

Around that, the international bookings are genuinely first-rate. The King’s Singers — the legendary British vocal ensemble — play a Saturday matinee. Grammy-nominated mandolinist Avi Avital takes the same stage that evening. Add pianist Stewart Goodyear, violinist Kerson Leong with Thirteen Strings, vibraphonist Lucy Landymore playing Hans Zimmer, tango ensembles, brass bands, and organ recitals, and you have two weeks where there’s something worth hearing nearly every single day.

🌟 2026 Headliners & Highlights

Premium events are the festival’s marquee bookings — included free for Diamond passholders, discounted for Regular and Youth passholders, and open to everyone with an individual ticket.

📅 Festival at a Glance

Fourteen days of concerts. Times and programs below come from the festival’s official 2026 brochure — a Premium tag means the event needs a separate ticket unless you hold a Diamond Pass.

Week One

Week Two

🎫 Passes & Tickets

Every concert sells individual tickets — regular events typically run about $20 to $100 depending on seating, and door tickets are available subject to quantity. But if you plan on more than a couple of concerts, a pass is the better deal.

The pass is a physical, non-transferable card that must be shown at the door for every concert. Passes bought now during the festival can be picked up at Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre.

🏛 The Venues

Most concerts happen downtown within walking distance of each other, with a few outliers worth planning around. Dominion-Chalmers is the hub — a 1912 church with a Neo-Byzantine sanctuary that Carleton University converted into one of Ottawa’s best-sounding concert halls.

Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre · 290 Lisgar St Church of St. Barnabas · 70 James St allsaints Event Space · 315 Chapel St First Baptist Church St. Matthew’s Anglican Church Woodroffe United Church Algonquin Commons Theatre · 1385 Woodroffe Ave Cumberland Heritage Village Museum · 2940 Old Montreal Rd

📍 The Essentials

🚗 Getting There & Parking

The main venue, Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre, sits in Ottawa’s Centretown at the corner of Cooper and O’Connor, with the main entrance on Lisgar Street — an easy walk from Bank Street, Elgin Street restaurants, and downtown transit routes.

Parking at Dominion-Chalmers: A 24/7 paid lot sits on the north (Lisgar) side of the building — a flat evening fee applies after 6 pm, and weekend days are a flat daytime rate too. Overflow street parking runs along Cooper, Lisgar, and O’Connor.

Off-site venues: Algonquin Commons Theatre and Woodroffe United are in the city’s west end, and the Cumberland Heritage Village Museum is a roughly 30-minute drive east of downtown — budget extra travel time for those dates.

💡 A Few Things Worth Knowing Before You Go

🎫 Door tickets are a real option. Individual tickets are sold at the door for each event, subject to quantity — so a spontaneous concert night mid-festival is very doable, though the big Premium names are safest booked ahead.

🌅 Use the noon concerts. Several weekdays have free-flowing lunchtime programming at Dominion-Chalmers or St. Barnabas — an easy way to fold the festival into a workday downtown.

📆 Circle Saturday, July 11. The King’s Singers at 2 pm and Avi Avital at 7:30 pm in the same hall makes it the single best day of the festival — with time for dinner on Elgin Street in between.

👪 New to classical? Start sideways. The Hans Zimmer program, Stradivatango!, the trumpet celebration, and the Duke Ellington night are all built for listeners who don’t own a single symphony recording.

🚘 Double-check the venue before heading out. With eight locations in play — some downtown, some in the west end, one out in Cumberland — the fastest way to ruin an evening is showing up at the wrong church.

❓ Common Questions