New York, New York
LIMELIGHT’S GUIDE TO THE BEST ARTS EVENTS IN THE BIG APPLE this November
Classical Music
Jansons and the BRSO
Maris Jansons conducts the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Weber’s Overture to his opera Euryanthe. Rudolf Buchbinder is the soloist for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 23 followed by Shostakovich’s intensly powerful Tenth Symphony, a work reflecting on his precarious life in Stalin’s Soviet Union with music that is viscerally powerful.
Muti & Didonato
Rome connects the music heard here as Riccardo Muti conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Joyce DiDonato is the soloist in Berlioz’s powerful cantata La Mort de Cléopâtre, a Prix de Rome candidate. Bizet paid tribute to the city in his orchestral suite Roma, and Respighi’s spectacular tone poem Pines of Rome paints the city’s greenery in technicolor sound.
Currentzis’s requiem
Verdi’s Messa da Requiem is one of music’s most transcendent works. Electrifying conductor Teodor Currentzis and the 106-member orchestra and 80-member chorus of musicAeterna from Perm, Russia, will take the stage in The Shed following rapturous reviews at this summer’s Salzburg Festival. This is Currentzis and musicAeterna’s North American debut.
Barton and ACO
A celebration of composers with roots in New England, American Composers Orchestra presents the world premieres of Hilary Purrington’s Harp of Nerves and orchestrations of songs by Ives, arranged by Purrington, Hannah Lash, and Jonathan Bailey Holland, featuring mezzo Jamie Barton. The New York premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Evidence completes the program.
Trifonov’s Scriabin
New York Philharmonic Music Director Jaap van Zweden conducts Artist-in-Residence and Grammy Award-winner Daniil Trifonov in Scriabin’s jewel of a Piano Concerto — rhapsodic, poetic, and colorful. Tchaikovsky’s emotionally charged Fifth Symphony, a work with glorious melodies that never cease to thrill, is also on the menu.
Opera
A classic La Bohème
Three casts of across the season bring Puccini’s classic tragedy of bohemian friends and lovers to life in Franco Zeffirelli’s immortal, extra-packed staging. This month it’s tenor Matthew Polenzani as the poet Rodolfo, alongside soprano Ailyn Pérez as the fragile Mimì. Marco Armiliato conducts. Watch out for Roberto Alagna and Joseph Calleja later in the season.
Glass’s Akhnaten
Director Phelim McDermott incorporates acrobats to tackle Philip Glass’s operatic masterpiece. Rising star countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo is the titular pharaoh, the revolutionary ruler who attempted to transform ancient Egypt, with mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges in her Met debut as his wife, Nefertiti. Karen Kamensek conducts in her Met debut.
Tristan Act II
For this concert performance of Act II of Wagner’s operatic masterpiece, a spellbinding meditation on love and death, Gianandrea Noseda and the National Symphony Orchestra lead soprano Christine Goerke and tenor Stephen Gould in one of the most rapturous and demanding duets in the repertory. Part of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival.
Weill and Blitzstein
New York Festival of Song presents a new staging of two powerful, neglected musical theatre works by Marc Blitzstein and Kurt Weill. Blitzstein’s No For An Answer, first staged in 1941, focuses on a feisty group of resort workers struggling with unemployment during the off-season; Der Silbersee is a dystopian fantasy with a miraculous happy ending.
the queen of spades
Vasily Petrenko conducts Elijah Moshinsky’s staging of Tchaikovsky’s thriller . Tenors Aleksandrs Antonenko and Yusif Eyvazov share the role of Hermann, the fanatical gambler whose obsession with a powerful secret drives him to madness. Soprano Lise Davidsen makes her anticipated Met debut as his long-suffering lover with Larissa Diadkova as the Countess.
Musicals & Theatre
pinter’s betrayal
With poetic precision, rich humour and an extraordinary emotional force, Betrayal charts a compelling seven-year romance, thrillingly captured in reverse chronological order. Hollywood star Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox star in British director Jamie Lloyd’s production of Harold Pinter’s classic drama fresh from London’s West End.
jagged little pill
Inspired by Alanis Morissette’s Grammy Award-winning album, Jagged Little Pill opens on Broadway. The Healys are a picture-perfect family — but looks can be deceiving. When the cracks begin to show, they must choose between maintaining the status quo or facing harsh truths about themselves, their community, and the world around them.
The Great Society
Brian Cox stars as Lyndon B. Johnson in Robert Schenkkan’s sequel to All The Way. The play follows LBJ’s landslide election to the agonizing decision not to run for re-election just three years later. It was an era that would define history: the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the destruction of Vietnam.
The Sound Inside
Mary Louise Parker returns to Broadway in Adam Rapp’s drama. The Sound Inside follows Bella Baird, an accomplished professor at an Ivy League university who prizes her solitude. But when she faces a challenge that she cannot tackle alone, she allies herself with a brilliant and mysterious student, Christopher (Will Hochmann). David Cromer directs.
The Young Man From Atlanta
Danger lurks just below the surface in Horton Foote’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of an aging couple still reeling from the death of their only child. Set against the backdrop of a rapidly modernizing 1950s Houston, the Kidders’ lives are turned upside down once again when a figure from their son’s past shows up in town.
New York, New York
LIMELIGHT’S GUIDE TO THE BEST ARTS EVENTS IN THE BIG APPLE
Australians are the world’s greatest tourists, right? And no city offers quite as much in the way of artist thrills and spills as the Big Apple. After a year spent finding his feet, Limelight Editor-at-Large Clive Paget has hunted down the big names and haunted the city’s glittering venues. He’s also found unexpected performance spaces, from clubs to churches and even the odd cemetery. From the glamour of the Met and the buzz of Broadway to classical music hideaways and, yes, even some free stuff, our insider’s guide aims to be everything an adventurous cultural tourist needs.