THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022 5
As New York City venues reopen, it’s
advisable to confirm in advance the
requirements for in-person attendance.ILLUSTRATIONS BY DIEGO MALLO
This summer’s classical performances
reflect a pandemic reset that feels more
than temporary. Lincoln Center has col-
lapsed all of its seasonal programs and
series into a single initiative, Summer for
the City (May 14-Aug. 14). The festival
embraces diversity, with free events that
include a Pride-themed Mini Kiki Ball
( June 24) and a Juneteenth celebration
( June 19). The Mostly Mozart Festival
Orchestra, survivors of the reorgani-
zation, plays six different programs,
featuring Henri Vieuxtemps’s highly
embroidered Violin Concerto No. 5,
with Joshua Bell (Aug. 2-3), and Mo-
zart’s Requiem (Aug. 5-6).
The Metropolitan Opera’s season,
typically finished in May, runs into June,
with Brett Dean’s “Hamlet” (May 13-
June 9). Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the
Met orchestra in back-to-back concerts,
at Carnegie Hall—Act I of Wagner’s “Die
Walküre” ( June 15) and an all-Berlioz
program ( June 16). As part of their con-
tract, the players secured a permanent
chamber concert series of their own, at
Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall ( June 9).
As the New York Philharmonic looks
forward to the reopening of a renovated
David Geffen Hall, in the fall, it accom-
panies the pianist Beatrice Rana to Jazz
at Lincoln Center, for Tchaikovsky’s
Piano Concerto No. 1 ( June 2-4). At
the eighth annual Time:Spans Festival,leading-edge new-music groups—Sō
Percussion (Aug. 17), Ensemble Signal
(Aug. 19), the International Contem-
porary Ensemble (Aug. 20)—take up
works written in the past decade.
For the warm-weather inclined,
Death of Classical hosts “Hot Dogs,
Hooch & Handel” (May 27), allow-
ing audiences to wander Green-Wood
Cemetery, refreshments in hand, for
felicitous encounters with clusters of
Baroque musicians. The orchestra the
Knights brings a program designed
around Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata,
which its dedicatee famously never
played, to the Naumburg Bandshell, in
Central Park ( June 14). At Bryant Park,
New York City Opera stages abridged
versions of “Il Barbiere di Siviglia”
(May 27) and “La Traviata” (Aug. 12),
and it streams them online.
Out of town, Bard SummerScape
frames its 2022 festival around Rach-
maninoff. Garrick Ohlsson performs
Brahms’s complete works for solo
piano at Tanglewood, in the Berk-
shires (Aug. 16-25). And at Caramoor,
in Katonah, N.Y., Michael Gordon, a co-
founder of Bang on a Can, unveils “Field
of Vision” ( July 24), a free site-specific
piece with forty percussionists enter-
taining the audience in and around the
estate’s verdant Sunken Garden.
—Oussama ZahrCLASSICALMUSIC
SUMMERPREVIEW
(^1) Al-Fresco Concerts, Out-of-Town Highlights
MUSIC
Tori Amos
POP ROCK With the release of her landmark
début, “Little Earthquakes,” Tori Amos
became a luminary of the nineties feminist
singer-songwriter movement, and her high-
wire piano rock has lost none of its potency
since. A formative inspiration to younger
generations of songwriters, Amos still wields
high drama, angst, and vulnerability as keys to
making meaning in a brutal world. She wrote
her sixteenth album, this past year’s “Ocean
to Ocean,” during the depths of a pandemic
lockdown, at her home in the coastal En-
glish city of Cornwall, using the music to
process the quiet chaos. Amos reflects on
grief, the wisdom of nature, and—on the song
“29 Years”—her own artistic journey toward
“elusive truth.” Through the decades of mys-
tery, Amos’s listeners keep finding her.—Jenn
Pelly (Kings Theatre; May 11.)
Brad Barr
INSTRUMENTAL The guitarist Brad Barr has per-
formed genteel folk-rock songs and jazz-in-
fused jams in his bands the Barr Brothers and
the Slip, respectively. As a soloist, he labors
in yet another gear, presenting instrumen-
tal meditations that gaze pointedly inward.
The All for One Theatre founder Michael
Wolk beckoned Barr to record a series of
instrumentals for his company to employ
as incidental music. Those compositions
form the body of Barr’s recent album, “The
Winter Mission,” which milks the guitar
for its atmospheric powers. Such works are
inherently open to interpretation. To Barr,
the album rotates on his talisman number,
two hundred and sixteen; to his listeners it
might conjure quiet passion, mystery, or cav-
ernous introspection.—Jay Ruttenberg (Triad
Theatre; May 13.)
Jennifer Cardini
ELECTRONIC This d.j. of long standing in
Paris’s house and techno scenes is the kind
of spinner who routinely makes not just a
dancer but a listener take notice. A Cardini
set tends to feel linear without being pre-
dictable; each successive selection seems to
turn a different corner. On Cardini’s recent
edition of BBC Radio 1’s “Essential Mix,”
her assured pacing makes the two-hour run-
ning time fly by. Prancing Hi-NRG key-
board patterns, a flurry of acid squelches,
shoulder-jacking square-wave bass lines,
all check—but the pinnacle comes near the
midway point, when the beats drop out en-
tirely, leaving one’s limbs hinged upon their
reappearance.—Michaelangelo Matos (Good
Room; May 13.)
“Lucia di Lammermoor”
CLASSICAL In the Metropolitan Opera’s new
production of “Lucia di Lammermoor,”
the director Simon Stone parses the forces
that drive Donizetti’s tragedy—financial