8 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
ILLUSTRATION BY LIAM HOPKINS
The designers of Central Park intended the Ramble, a thirty-eight-acre
expanse of footpaths winding through densely vegetated woodland, to
be a “wild garden”—an oasis at the heart of a metropolis. Beginning
in the early twentieth century, the area also served as a destination
for gay men to pursue clandestine sexual encounters. “Ramble,” a
free event presented by Bent Duo, on Aug. 16, at Le Petit Versailles,
derives more than just its title from the historic rendezvous spot. On
arrival, attendees choose visual symbols that determine their random
interactions with the performers—the pianist David Friend and the
percussionist Bill Solomon—in the shady recesses of a former Alphabet
City auto chop shop repurposed as a public garden. On Aug. 18, at
the DiMenna Center, the duo perform in a nominally more orthodox
venture, playing music by Sarah Hennies on a bill shared with the
art-rock band Deerhoof.—Steve SmithGARDENMUSIC
An Evening of Bel Canto
Berkshire Opera Festival
OUT OF TOWN In the run-up to the Berkshire
Opera Festival’s production of Donizetti’s
“Don Pasquale,” the company, which is based
in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, presents
cast members in a free concert of bel-canto-op-
era excerpts. The program spans works from
the era’s three major composers, revealing a
neat cross-section of Rossini’s fizziness, Doni-
zetti’s incisiveness, and Bellini’s lyricism, with
selections from “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” “I Pu-
ritani,” “La Sonnambula,” “L’Elisir d’Amore,”
and “Don Pasquale”; the pianist Andrew Sun
accompanies the singers.—Oussama Zahr (Aug.
14 at 7:30.)Tanglewood Music Festival
Lenox, Mass.
OUT OF TOWN The programming at Tanglewood
this week leans almost wholly on canonical
fare. The violinist Gil Shaham joins the Brook-
lyn ensemble the Knights for Brahms’s Violin
Concerto, surrounded by a lively mix of piecesby Kodály, Ligeti, and Kurtág. Keith Lockhart
and the Boston Pops Orchestra accompany a
screening of “Star Wars,” playing the cease-
lessly satisfying score by the ensemble’s cel-
ebrated laureate conductor John Williams.
Over the weekend, the Boston Symphony, led
by François-Xavier Roth, offers solid if staid
selections of Schumann and Brahms; Kirill
Gerstein plays the latter’s Piano Concerto
No. 2 on Saturday, and Yo-Yo Ma graces the
former’s Cello Concerto on Sunday.—Steve
Smith (Aug. 15-17 at 8 and Aug. 18 at 2:30.)“Princess Maleine”
La Mama
Maurice Maeterlinck won a Nobel Prize
in 1911, but the influential Symbolist play-
wright’s chief claim to fame among opera fans
today is that he provided the source material
for Debussy’s haunting masterpiece “Pelléas
et Mélisande.” The composer Whitney George
adapts Maeterlinck’s first play, “Princess Ma-
leine,” another dark fairy tale with a cursed air,
into a two-act opera for the dell’Arte Opera
Festival; George and Chris Fecteau share con-
ducting duties, and Bea Goodwin, the opera’s
librettist, directs.—O.Z. (Aug. 16, Aug. 20, Aug.
22, and Aug. 24 at 7:30 and Aug. 18 at 2.)Matana Roberts
DiMenna Center
The saxophonist, composer, and multidis-
ciplinary artist Matana Roberts put herself
on the map with “Coin Coin,” a breathtaking
trio of albums that evoke black American
history and culture with ferocity, inventive-
ness, and compassion. (A fourth installment
arrives in October.) In “I call america: Sandy
Speaks...,” part of a newer series of multi-
media installation-performances sparked by
present-day concerns, Roberts marshals a team
of improvisers, media artists, and members of
the International Contemporary Ensemble
to contemplate the life and untimely death
of Sandra Bland. Afterward, in a four-night
Stone residency, Roberts returns to bare essen-
tials in a series of one-on-one encounters with
the drummer Gerald Cleaver, the guitarists
Ava Mendoza and Liberty Ellman, and the
pianist Vijay Iyer.—S.S. (Aug. 17 at 8; Aug.
20-24 at 8:30.)“The Queen of Spades”
Glimmerglass Festival
OUT OF TOWN Kelley Rourke’s sixty-five-minute
abridgment of Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen
of Spades” keeps much of the opera’s most
famous music and inserts new dialogue drawn
from the original short story by Pushkin. She
intends to scale down the pulsating, luxuri-
antly scored Romantic drama to a scope more
consistent with Pushkin’s efficient supernatu-
ral thriller, which ends with a swift turn of the
knife. Michelle Rofrano conducts a six-piece
chamber orchestration, and Francesca Zam-
bello directs. Also playing: As Glimmerglass
winds down its summer season, the weekend
offers two more chances to see all four of the
upstate company’s main-stage works—“La
Traviata,” “Showboat,” “Blue,” and “The
Ghosts of Versailles”—in a three-day span
(Aug. 16-18 or Aug. 17-19).—O.Z. (Aug. 19 at 5.)1
CLASSICALMUSIC
Final Concerts
Bridgehampton Chamber Music
Festival
OUT OF TOWN In a final push before their sum-
mer break, the musicians of this Bridgehamp-
ton festival give three concerts this week. Each
positions a short piece by a contemporary com-
poser amid a slate of well-curated classics. On
Wednesday, Anna Clyne’s spectral “Rest These
Hands,” for solo violin, follows Gaubert’s im-
pressionistic “Trois Aquarelles,” for flute and
piano. Saturday’s concert includes selections
from George Tsontakis’s “Knickknacks,” a
set of violin-viola miniatures that offer a
teasing contrast to the encyclopedic span of
Schubert’s four-hand Fantasie in F Minor.
The series closes with Brahms’s troubled
Piano Quintet in F Minor, but Reena Esmail’s
pacific piano trio “Saans (Breath),” which
precedes it, might make for a more lasting
memory.—Fergus McIntosh (Aug. 14 and Aug.
17-18 at 6:30.)