16 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
ILLUSTRATION BY MAX DALTON
Like schoolchildren who don’t want sum-
mer to end, the New York Philharmonic
and the Broadway soprano Kelli O’Hara
open the fall season with Barber’s “Knox-
ville: Summer of 1915,” a lovely tribute to
a warm Tennessee evening (Sept. 18-21).
Then the orchestra and its music director,
Jaap van Zweden, venture into the bowels
of horror with a fully staged double bill of
Schoenberg’s Expressionist monodrama
“Erwartung” and Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s
Castle,” with Katarina Karnéus, Nina
Stemme, and Johannes Martin Kränzle
(Sept. 26-28).
In the first concert of Yannick Nézet-
Séguin’s “Perspectives” series, at Carnegie
Hall, the Canadian conductor summits
Strauss’s majestic “Alpine Symphony”
with the Philadelphia Orchestra (Oct. 15).
Carnegie has all but cleared its 2020 cal-
endar to celebrate Beethoven’s two-hun-
dred-and-fiftieth birthday, so the pianists
Marc-André Hamelin (Oct. 22), Denis
Matsuev (Oct. 20), and Daniil Trifonov
and Sergei Babayan (Oct. 16) opt for
brooding, muscular Russian music instead.
Two centuries younger than Beetho-
ven, the Chamber Music Society turns
fifty this year, marking the milestone
with a concert of pieces by composers
who forged the sound of American art
music. David Finckel, Paul Neubauer,
David Shifrin, and Ransom Wilson,
among others, play Copland’s “Appala-
chian Spring” and Dvořák’s “American”
Quintet—wistful reminders of the tender
strength evoked by the country’s iconic
mountains and plains (Oct. 15).
It’s been nearly thirty years since the
Metropolitan Opera staged Gershwin’s
idea of American folk music, “Porgy and
Bess,” with its sui-generis blend of opera,
jazz, and Broadway. Still, the tenants of
the work’s fictitious South Carolina slum
have a way of snapping to life in tunes
immortalized by Leontyne Price and Ella
Fitzgerald; Eric Owens and Angel Blue
star in James Robinson’s season-opening
production (Sept. 23-Oct. 16). Anthony
Braxton, a very different kind of jazz
auteur, gets a retrospective to open the
twentieth annual “Composer Portraits”
series at Miller Theatre. The chamber
ensemble Either/Or and the Jack Quartet
play his mind-clearing avant-garde com-
positions (Sept. 25).
In “Zauberland,” Katie Mitchell’s
stage adaptation of Schumann’s song
cycle “Dichterliebe,” for Lincoln Center’s
tenth-anniversary White Light Festival,
the soprano Julia Bullock portrays a Syr-
ian refugee seeking the promised peace
of a “magic land.” Schumann’s pastoral
idyll, with its forests and flowers, is still
there, but this version gives new meaning
to the gentle longing that runs through
the work like a river.
—Oussama ZahrCLASSICAL MUSIC
FALL PREVIEW
Anniversaries, American Portraits, Refugees
1
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Tanglewood Music Festival
Lenox, Mass.
OUT OF TOWN Bursting into its home stretch
this week, Tanglewood presents an evening
of instrumental sonatas that the composer
Tan Dan derived from his celebrated scores
for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and
“Hero,” played alongside screened excerpts
from the films (Aug. 21). The pianist Conrad
Tao makes his auspicious festival début with
the Boston Symphony, playing Ravel’s Piano
Concerto in G, with Yu-An Chang conducting
(Aug. 23). John Williams hosts Tanglewood’s
popular annual film night (Aug. 24), in which
David Newman conducts the Boston Pops in
silver-screen fare. And Giancarlo Guerrero
leads the Boston Symphony in the festival’s
customary benediction, Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony (Aug. 25).—Steve Smith (Aug. 21-
at 8 and Aug. 25 at 2:30.)“Experiments in Noise”
Museum of Chinese in America
In conjunction with the exhibition “The Moon
Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and
Belonging,” the museum presents a program
of groundbreaking Chinese-American avant-
garde musicians whose work echoes, amplifies,
and extends the show’s themes of identity and
appropriation. Noise factors, in varying ways,
into the bucolic reveries of Daren Ho, the
corporeal vocal improvisations of Charmaine
Lee, and the ecstatic excess of C. Spencer Yeh.
The concert is free with museum admission;
advance registration online is advised.—S.S.
(Aug. 23 at 7.)Roomful of Teeth
MASS MoCA
OUT OF TOWN Brad Wells, a conductor, singer,
and composer, formed Roomful of Teeth, in
2009, to pursue a mission of “reimagining the
expressive potential of the human voice” by
developing new techniques and fostering fresh
repertoire. In its first ten years, the group has
made an indelible impact on the new-music
scene and also helped one of its members,
Caroline Shaw, become the youngest winner
of the Pulitzer Prize for music. Here, the
ensemble embarks upon its second decade
with a victory lap through past triumphs,
a première by Eve Beglarian featuring the
Dessoff Choirs, and a trio of commissioned
works by Mingjia Chen, Mary Kouyoumdjian,
and Peter S. Shin, facilitated by the American
Composers Forum.—S.S. (Aug. 23 at 8.)“Don Pasquale”
Berkshire Opera Festival
OUT OF TOWN Donizetti’s bel-canto tickler
“Don Pasquale” brought May-Decem-
ber marriages, conspicuous consumption,work by Bokaer, J. M. Tate, Kuumba Dance and
Drum, and Tony Orrico, along with a Matthew
Placek dance party.—B.S. (Aug. 23-Sept. 2.)