Lincoln Centre

The New York Philharmonic kicked off this season with a screening of Steven Spielberg’s 2021 film of West Side Story with live orchestral accompaniment. Leonard Bernstein’s iconic score – which successfully combines lyricism with Latin-American rhythms, jazz, bebop, blues, vaudeville, and ballet – has a complicated history and exists in several versions. The story, which transforms Shakespeare’s Romeo …

New York Philharmonic – David Newman conducts Leonard Bernstein’s score to a Live Screening of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story Read More »

Dating from 1850, Crispino e la Comare (Crispino and the Fairy), a whimsical satire and the final opera composed by the Ricci brothers, soon became wildly popular in Italy and was also appreciated in numerous places worldwide. Though rarely staged in the twentieth-century, the short-lived (1906-1910) Manhattan Opera Company presented the work in 1909 and …

Teatro Nuovo at Lincoln Center – Crispino e la Comare Read More »

Teatro Nuovo opens its 2023 season with Gaetano Donizetti’s rarely heard Poliuto. First staged in New York in 1859 at the Academy of Music, then the city’s premier opera venue, none of its other leading houses has mounted the work since. Even concert performances are rare. The most recent was in 1998 at Carnegie Hall, …

Teatro Nuovo at Lincoln Center – Donizetti’s Poliuto Read More »

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City Julia Wolfe’s unEarth was the featured work in the New York Philharmonic’s on-going series exploring climate change and exploiting the dynamic audiovisual capabilities of the newly renovated Geffen Hall. The oratorio-like multimedia work is cast in three movements – “Flood”, “Forest”, and “Fix It” – …

New York Philharmonic – Jaap van Zweden conducts Julia Wolfe’s unEarth, and Frank Huang plays Sibelius’s Violin Concerto Read More »

Chick Corea’s final work received its first US performance. Joseph Alessi, who delivered its world premiere with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in August 2021, and at whose instigation Corea’s spirited and stylistically varied piece was composed, played with sparkling aplomb. The score begins with notation “Free solo – improvised whenever.” Alessi seized the moment, …

New York Philharmonic – Marin Alsop conducts Barber and Prokofiev – Joseph Alessi plays Chick Corea’s Trombone Concerto Read More »

The evening opened on a somber note, with a tenderly rendered account of Eduard Resatsch’s arrangement of Valentin Silvestrov’s a cappella Prayer for Ukraine, now often performed worldwide to express solidarity with the Ukrainian people. A vibrant performance of Prokofiev’s masterful Third Symphony followed. Written in the late-1920s and drawing on material from his opera The Fiery …

New York Philharmonic – James Gaffigan & Yunchan Lim Read More »

One of a very few works in which he does not refer to folk melodies or hymn tunes, Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question is best described as a philosophical statement in music. The enigmatic and cosmic composition may have been inspired by New Englander Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem ‘The Sphinx’ in which the title phrase …

New York Philharmonic – Susanna Mälkki conducts Unanswered Question, Petrushka & Felipa Lara’s Double Concerto Read More »

Composed for the Thomaskirche in Leipzig in 1727, Bach’s St Matthew Passion – a vivid retelling of the story of the betrayal, execution, and burial of Jesus – is set to a combination of biblical verses, poetic texts by the German poet Picander, and pre-existing Lutheran hymns. Though originally conceived for strictly liturgical use, the …

New York Philharmonic – Jaap van Zweden conducts Bach’s St Matthew Passion Read More »

Olivier Messiaen’s musical language is a world unto itself, spanning cultures, continents, and eras in both structure and form. Fascinated by birdsong, complicated rhythms, and love – both sacred and profane – he stamped his scores with his many-faceted personality. Composed from 1946 to 1948 on commission from Serge Koussevitzky, Leonard Bernstein conducting the premiere …

New York Philharmonic – Jaap van Zweden conducts Messiaen’s Turangalîla-symphonie Read More »

Michael Tilson Thomas’s thoughtful sequence of songs to texts by Rainer Maria Rilke was introduced by MTT in an amusing ten-minute spoken introduction to a highly unconventional piece that intermixes references to cowboy songs with German language reflections on mortality. As he explained, the work is deeply personal, rooted in reflections he has pondered for …

New York Philharmonic – Michael Tilson Thomas conducts Meditations on Rilke and Schubert 9  Read More »