Winnipeg New Music Festival 2027: Dates, Passes, Venues

The Winnipeg New Music Festival is the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's week of new and recent concert music, and it falls in late January. Its thirty-fifth edition ran from January 21 to 29, 2026, and that is the shape the week usually takes: five or six concerts spread across nine days rather than packed into a weekend. The base is the Centennial Concert Hall at 555 Main Street. The WSO bills the festival as the largest in Canada given over entirely to contemporary art music, which for a visitor means a week where most of what you hear was written in your lifetime, and some of it in the last twelve months.

How the week is put together

Each concert is numbered and named, and the names tell you more than the numbers do. The 2026 run opened on a Wednesday with a showcase called Launchpad, then went to WNMF 1 Sunrise on the Friday, WNMF 3 Beyond Horizons the following Tuesday, WNMF 4 CC Duo: Hyperfocused on the Wednesday, and closed Thursday with WNMF 5 Theofanidis & Stafylakis: Sunset. The gaps are deliberate. Two or three clear days in the middle of the festival are what let the orchestra rehearse music it has never played, and they are also what makes the week survivable for anyone attending all of it.

Tickets work two ways. The WSO sells a festival pass covering the whole run, priced from $49 to $99 in 2026, and it sells single tickets for individual concerts. The opening showcase was free that year, which does not mean you can simply turn up: a free ticket still had to be reserved. If you are coming to Winnipeg for the festival rather than catching one concert while you are here, the pass is the cheaper route by a wide margin, and it is the version that gets you into the smaller rooms.

There is a part of the festival that is not a concert. The Michael Nesbitt Composers Institute brings a small group of composers to Winnipeg for the same days, to sit in on rehearsals and workshops alongside the orchestra. It is not a public programme, but it shapes what ends up on the stage. Kelly-Marie Murphy became the WSO's composer-in-residence and a co-curator of the festival for the 2026-27 season, which makes the 2027 festival the first programmed under that curatorship.

Which hall, and getting to each one

The Centennial Concert Hall sits inside the Manitoba Centennial Centre on Main Street, across from City Hall, at the southern edge of the Exchange District. From the Corydon and Crescentwood blocks the D19 Corydon runs downtown to its terminal on Kennedy Street, and from there it is about fifteen minutes on foot east and north to Main. Winnipeg Transit's 2026 fare is $3.45 in cash or $3.10 on peggo e-cash, and drivers carry no change.

The festival does not stay in one building. In 2026 it also used Knox United Church at 400 Edmonton Street, a Late Gothic Revival pile built between 1914 and 1918 to John H. G. Russell's design, the largest United church in Manitoba and a provincial heritage site. For anyone arriving by bus it is the easiest of the venues to reach, because Edmonton Street runs one block east of the Kennedy Street terminal where the D19 ends. The third room is a long way from the other two: the Desautels Concert Hall at 150 Dafoe Road, tucked behind Taché Hall on the University of Manitoba's Fort Garry campus, with the public entrance on Maclean Crescent through a glass-wrapped lobby. That trip runs south out of the city centre instead of into it, on the BLUE line down the Southwest Transitway, so check which hall your concert is in before you choose a bus.

Daylight is the other thing worth knowing. The sun sets in Winnipeg at about 5:05 p.m. on January 22 and has only reached 5:16 p.m. by the end of the month, so every evening concert in the festival involves walking to and from the hall in the dark, on a week of the year when the wind off Main Street has nothing to slow it down. Parlour Coffee, a block south at 468 Main Street, keeps daytime hours and closes on Sundays, which makes it a stop on the afternoon of a concert day rather than on the way in.

Where to stay for the New Music Festival

Our three-bedroom home is in Crescentwood, a few blocks south of Corydon Avenue. The Centennial Concert Hall is roughly ten minutes away by car and closer to twenty-five by bus on the D19. The nine-day spread is what makes that distance matter: a pass holder is going downtown on four or five separate evenings, not once, and each of those evenings ends after dark in January. Being twenty minutes from the hall rather than an hour changes how many of the concerts you actually attend.

Late January also puts you in reach of the rest of the city's winter programme, most of which is running the same weeks. Our Airbnb listing shows which January dates are open.