LINCOLN CENTER

Avery Fisher Hall
New York Philharmonic

David Robertson - Conductor
Emanuel Ax - Piano

Rachmaninoff - Vocalise
Chopin - Piano Concerto No. 2
Stravinsky - Firebird Suite
Bartok - The Miraculous Mandarin Suite

Listen to Ax play Chopin's Second Movement from Concerto No. 2. Beautiful!

The temperature today in NYC is a low of 13 and a high of 22 degrees.  A great evening to sit and just listen.

LINCOLN CENTER

Rose Hall
Jazz at Lincoln Center

"The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis present music of the Americas through the lens of four pioneering giants of jazz.  Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus singularly pursued ancestral music, particularly from Africa and Latin America, and used their discoveries to broaden the horizons of their artistry and create new terrain for jazz. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis will play selections from Ellington's Latin American Suite and Virgin Islands Suite; Coltrane's Olé Coltrane and Africa Brass; Mingus' Tijuana Moods; and various pieces from Gillespie's early Afro-Cuban era through his later work with the United Nations band, showing his evolution from Afro-Cuban to a more expansive Afro-Latin idiom.  The JLCO with Wynton Marsalis will illuminate the historically important rhythmic distinctions, chant-based melodies, and modal soundscapes created as a result of these albums that forever changed the conception of the boundaries of jazz."

PERFORMANCE

JP Morgan Library
The Rodney Marsalis Philadelphia Big Brass

The Rodney Mack Philadelphia Big Brass: Brothers on the Battlefield

To coincide with the exhibition Lincoln Speaks: Words that Transformed a Nation, the Rodney Mack Philadelphia Big Brass performs the New York premiere of Brothers on the Battlefield, a multimedia work featuring music from the American Civil War through the Civil Rights Movement, with a five piece brass band and piano, narration, and projected images. Works performed include Amazing Grace, When the Saints Go Marching In and works by John Philip Sousa, Leonard Bernstein, and Pete Seeger, among others.

LINCOLN CENTER

Koch Theater
New York City Ballet

A quiet, pleasant evening in a great venue.  There is light snow on the ground.

ALL BALANCHINE I
CLASSIC COMBINATION

• Serenade
• Agon
• Symphony in C

Uncontested masterworks, these three ballets present vastly differing styles for a Balanchine experience that simply cannot be missed.

Running time: 2 Hr. 17 Min.

Serenade 

Music by: Peter Ilyitch Tschaikovsky

Choreography by: George Balanchine

Principal Casting: 

January 20, 24 Eve: Sterling Hyltin, Erica Pereira* (replaces Ashley Bouder), Teresa Reichlen, Robert Fairchild, Ask la Cour (*first time in role) January 25, 31 Mat: Sara Mearns, Erica Pereira (replaces Ashley Bouder), Megan LeCrone (replaces Rebecca Krohn), Jared Angle, Justin Peck* (*first time in role)

Originally crafted as a training exercise for the School of American Ballet and now performed by companies the world over, Serenade is a romantic work of immense sweep with a transcendent score.

Agon 

Music by: Igor Stravinsky

Choreography by: George Balanchine

Principal Casting: 

January 20, 24 Eve: Maria Kowroski, Amar Ramasar, Andrew Veyette, Lauren King, Ashley Laracey, Megan LeCrone (replaces Rebecca Krohn), Devin Alberda, Daniel Applebaum January 25, 31 Mat: Teresa Reichlen, Adrian Danchig-Waring, Anthony Huxley, Ashley Hod, Unity Phelan, Savannah Lowery, Allen Peiffer, Andrew Scordato

A wonder of propulsive angularity, the Black & White ballet Agon balances structural symmetry with choreographic ingenuity.

Symphony in C 

Music by: Georges Bizet

Choreography by: George Balanchine*

Principal Casting: 

January 20, 24 Eve: First Movement: Ashley Bouder* (replaces Tiler Peck), Chase Finlay; Second Movement: Sara Mearns, Jared Angle; Third Movement: Lauren Lovette* (replaces Erica Pereira), Gonzalo Garcia; Fourth Movement: Brittany Pollack*, Adrian Danchig-Waring (*first time in role)

January 25, 31 Mat: First Movement: Ashley Bouder, Andrew Veyette; Second Movement: Maria Kowroski, Tyler Angle; Third Movement: Lauren Lovette, Joseph Gordon*; Fourth Movement: Lauren King, Taylor Stanley  (*first time in role)

Symphony in C is a classical ballet that sparkles with over 50 dancers covered in Swarovski elements and a spectacular finale with the full cast onstage.

RECITAL

Carnegie Hall
Gidon Kremer - Violin
Daniil Trifonov - Piano

• MOZART -  Fantasy for Solo Piano, K. 397
• WEINBERG -  Violin Sonata No. 5, Op. 53
• MOZART -  Violin Sonata in E-flat Major, K. 481
• WEINBERG -  Solo Violin Sonata No. 3, Op. 126
• SCHUBERT -  Fantasy in C Major, D. 934

Trifonov is the red hot, young Russian pianist for which this will be the 3rd time we've heard him since last December.  He draws a crowd, sells tickets, and doesn't disappoint.




Below is the NYT review of the performance we heard.

MUSIC | MUSIC REVIEW

A Rising Star and a Master, Inspiring Each Other

Gidon Kremer and Daniil Trifonov Team Up at Carnegie Hall

By ANTHONY TOMMASINIJAN. 25, 2015

In a way, by joining the esteemed Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer for a duo recital at Carnegie Hall on Friday, the dazzling Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov was taking a bigger risk than when he played all of Liszt’s torturously difficult “Transcendental Études” in a recital last month on the same stage.

The boyish Mr. Trifonov, 23, hailed for his stupendous technique and expressive flair, has become a phenomenon in the field. Friday’s recital was just weeks after Mr. Trifonov’s acclaimed performance of Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic.

Still, it was heartening to see him embrace this opportunity to learn from a master, Mr. Kremer, 67. Their substantive program included a flinty sonata by the Polish-born composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg and Schubert’s great Fantasy in C, which is seldom heard probably because it is so difficult. And Mr. Kremer, whose adventurousness is undiminished, seemed inspired by Mr. Trifonov as well.

The program opened with Mr. Trifonov in a subtly dramatic and rich-toned performance of a solo work: Mozart’s dark, moody Fantasy in D minor (K. 397). Then both artists gave a commanding, intense account of Weinberg’s Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 5 (Op. 53), a teeming, mercurial work composed in 1953 and dedicated to Shostakovich, who became Weinberg’s mentor in Moscow. The first movement is wistful yet unsettled, with folkloric themes and a sometimes jagged piano part. The restless second movement has scurrying lines in the piano and obsessive outbursts for both instruments. A mysterious scherzolike third movement leads to an impetuous finale interrupted by a demonic fugue for piano of stunning difficulty, though Mr. Trifonov had no trouble making the tangle of contrapuntal lines clear.

In an elegant performance of Mozart’s vibrant Sonata in E flat (K. 481), Mr. Trifonov dispatched rippling runs with uncanny softness and milky colorings. I sometimes wanted a little more crackle and articulateness. Still, this was sensitive Mozart playing.

Mr. Kremer, a Weinberg champion, ranks that composer’s Solo Violin Sonata No. 3 (Op. 126), from 1979, with comparable works by Bartok and Bach. He made a case for this episodic 22-minute piece through his engrossing performance, from the opening section, all staggered chords and melodic fragments, through the final bitter dance, reminiscent of Shostakovich.

In the hushed first movement of Schubert’s Fantasy, a mournful violin theme emerges over delicate tremolos and rustling trills in the piano, music that in this rapt performance seemed profoundly mystical. The showy second movement is like a Hungarian folk dance, with leaping chords in the piano and the two instruments trading fancy runs and passagework. There is an elaborate slow movement — a grand theme with variations — and a rousing virtuosic finale. The piano part is especially hard, a maze of technical challenges. So having a virtuoso at the keyboard came in handy, especially one as sensitive to the music, and his veteran partner, as Mr. Trifonov.

In the final of two encores these colleagues showed their penchant for fun: the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli’s “Rag-Gidon-Time,” written for Mr. Kremer. This sly piece emerges in fits and starts. Mr. Kremer was a deadpan comedian; Mr. Trifonov almost broke out laughing a couple of times. He’ll learn.

CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage

Violin legend Gidon Kremer and the exciting young pianist Daniil Trifonov perform music that spans 18th-century Vienna to the 20th-century Soviet Union. Mozart’s E-flat Sonata features an exciting Rondo finale with variations. Schubert’s deceptively simple Fantasy in C Major also has variations—a virtuoso set on his song “Sei mir gegrüsst” (“I greet you”). The music of Polish-born Soviet composer Weinberg shares common ground with that of his friend and mentor Shostakovich, yet maintains its own original voice—particularly in its use of Jewish folk-like themes. Gidon Kremer, a champion of Weinberg’s music, brings tremendous flair and feeling to two of the composer’s violin works.

Gidon Kremer and Daniil Trifonov’s program introduces us to perhaps the greatest “unknown” composer of the 20th century: Shostakovich’s colleague and close friend Mieczysław Weinberg. Though born in Poland, he made his career in the USSR, and this essentially restricted his international fame until after his death in 1996. Weinberg’s life was a tragic one, haunted by the deaths of his entire immediate family at the beginning of World War II. Nevertheless, he was able to transmute his personal suffering into music of extraordinary expressive power and highly refined craftsmanship. We hear two works by him: the Sonata No. 5 for violin and piano (1953) and the more modernist and utterly remarkable Sonata No. 3 for solo violin (1979).

This program also presents two works by Mozart: his probing Fantasy for solo piano, K. 397, and his Violin Sonata in E-flat Major, K. 481. The slow movement of that last piece anticipates the language of the early-Romantic period, which is also represented by Schubert’s challenging Fantasy in C Major for violin and piano, a freely conceived expansion of one of his songs.

Kremer's bold program includes two works by Mieczysław Weinberg

Mozart, Schubert, no problem.

But the duo performance on Wednesday in the Maison symphonique by violinist Gidon Kremer and pianist Daniil Trifonov includes two works by Mieczysław Weinberg, 1919-1996, a Polish-born Russian composer whose name remains on the margins of recognition.

Even the spelling of that name has been a problem since the New Grove Dictionary of Music initially bestowed two generous paragraphs on him under the aegis of “Vaynberg.” The “Weinberg” spelling is now in the ascendant, especially after performances last year in Houston and New York of his Holocaust-theme opera The Passenger (which opens at the Chicago Lyric Opera on Feb. 24).

Kremer is a Weinberg believer. Notes to the violinist’s ECM recording of the Solo Violin Sonata No. 3 Op. 126 cite his opinion that this relatively progressive piece of 1979 can stand alongside Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin. At 22 minutes, it is approximately as substantial an executive challenge for the violinist.

The earlier Sonata No. 5 for violin and piano Op. 53 clocks in at 25 minutes, to judge by an audio-only pickup on YouTube that claims to be a live Kremer/Martha Argerich performance from November 2013. This score is toughly lyrical in a manner that brings to mind Shostakovich and, in its gentler interludes, Ravel.

Shostakovich is the composer to whom Weinberg is inevitably compared. Resemblances are not coincidental: Weinberg considered himself an acolyte. Shostakovich was in turn a staunch Weinberg supporter, dedicating his Tenth String Quartet to the younger composer.

He also stood up for Weinberg when the latter was peripherally implicated in the anti-Semitic “Doctors’ Plot” that Stalin and his cronies cooked up in the early 1950s. As a refugee of the Holocaust, which his immediate relatives did not survive, Weinberg seems to have maintained a remarkably noble bearing throughout his persecutions, which included internment in 1953. His travails did not much impair his output, which includes 26 symphonies.

These are not the first-ever Weinberg performances in Montreal: Yuli Turovsky and I Musici de Montréal gave us the Chamber Symphony No. 1 in 2007 and made a recording for Analekta. The question now as then is whether Weinberg’s music has enough individuality to reassert itself in the standard repertoire.

It is interesting to note also that Schubert’s Fantasie in C Major D. 934 has had a rough time of it since its première in 1828, when a critic (who left before the end of the performance) commented that the piece “lasts rather longer than the time that the Viennese are prepared to devote to their aesthetic pleasures.” Dreamy interpretations exceed 26 minutes. Other criticisms of the Fantasie have focused on its irregular form and the supposedly showy nature of the variations on Schubert’s own song Sei mir gegrüsst.

All of which is to say that Kremer’s program (repeated in Carnegie Hall on Friday) is bolder than most. Trifonov, the gold medallist of the 2011 Tchaikovsky Competition, is no mere accompanist. As a soloist he will play Mozart’s non-controversial Fantasy in C Minor K. 475. The program also includes Mozart’s Violin Sonata in E Flat K. 481.

A Young Star And a Master

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

JAN. 17, 2015

This winter the dazzling young Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov has been almost in residence in New York. Mr. Trifonov, who won both the Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv and the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 2011, played an acclaimed solo recital at Carnegie Hall in December. He then appeared with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, exciting audiences in Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto.

Lest anyone think Mr. Trifonov, at 23, is just the latest hot shot virtuoso, he is returning to Carnegie Hall this week with the formidable Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, 67, one of the most respected musicians of our time. Their intriguing recital offers two sonatas — one for solo violin, the other for violin and piano — by the Polish-born Russian composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996). Mr. Trifonov will play a Mozart fantasy for piano; the duo performs a Mozart violin sonata. The most revealing performance may come with Schubert’s great Fantasy in C for Violin and Piano.

LINCOLN CENTER

Rose Theater
Birth of the American Orchestra - Wynton Marsalis

We have never en entered Rose Theater an d we were shocked upon entering.  It is a remarkable space.  It is a large oval with the stage on the floor at one end.  The side of the oval are all boxes for about three levels up.

The music, as always, was spectacular.  Wynton Marsalis narrated and played.

This was the final piece. LISTEN!

Yes, they did this live.  It was amazing.  The musicians you see are the same ones we heard.

JALC to Present “The Birth of the American Orchestra” Concerts

Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will perform

By Jeff Tamarkin

Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will present a pair of concerts exploring “The Birth of the American Orchestra” on Jan. 9 and 10. Partly inspired by Marsalis’ Sept. 2013 Harvard University lecture, “Setting the Communal Table: The Evolution of the Jazz Orchestra,” the concerts, according t a press release, will explore “the development of the American orchestra through the syncopated dance beats of New Orleans, innovative ensemble virtuosity, and the monumentality of swing and the blues.”

The JLCO is expected to perform the music of Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson, Bill Challis, Duke Ellington, Benny Carter, Eddie Durham, Chico O’Farrill and Gil Fuller. 

The Birth of the American Orchestra concerts will take place in Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, located at Broadway at 60th Street, New York, New York. The concerts will also stream live in high-definition audio and video for free to a global audience via jazz.org/live.

Tickets can be purchased through jazz.org 24 hours a day or CenterCharge at 212-721-6500, open daily from 10am to 9pm. Tickets can also be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Box Office, located on Broadway at 60th Street, ground floor.

"Bebop pioneer Dizzy Gillespie once told JALC’s Managing & Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis something that would forever change his perception of big bands: "One should not consider it an achievement to lose one's orchestral tradition." Even as the structure of jazz ensembles continues to evolve, the American jazz orchestra still thrives today, and its development is the substructure of all jazz incarnations to follow. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis delves into this American phenomenon through the syncopated dance beats of New Orleans, innovative ensemble virtuosity, and the monumentality of swing and the blues. They will also explore the roles of orchestral instrumentation and the expansion of harmonic prospects, the evolution of the rhythm section, and the distinctiveness of the master composers and arrangers involved. At the forefront of this celebration are Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson, Bill Challis, Duke Ellington, Benny Carter, Eddie Durham, Chico O’Farrill, and Gil Fuller. These jazz architects, along with Gillespie’s profound mantra, are the foundation of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra - an orchestra with an astonishing concentration of immensely talented musicians and a collective regarded as the “finest big band in the world today.”

THEATER

Atlantic Theater
Dying For It - Nikolai Erdman

Dying for It is the story of Semyon, a man down on his luck and out of options. When he decides to throw in the towel and kill himself, a deluge of sympathetic visitors descends upon him, determined to make him a martyr for their many causes. Swept up in the firestorm of attention, Semyon does take matters into his own hands, but not quite in the fashion that everyone expects. An outrageous satire on the hypocrisy and illogic of Soviet life, this play was banned by Stalin before it ever saw the light of day, and is now regarded as an under-known 20th century classic comedy.

A New York Times review.

THEATER | THEATER REVIEW

A Martyr for the Cause, if Only He Could Pick One

‘Dying for It,’ Adapted From a Banned Soviet-Era Satire

By CHARLES ISHERWOODJAN. 8, 2015

Who can get enough of Soviet-era stage comedies? That’s a joke, of course. Who knew there were any?

Those curious to discover what might have tickled the funny bones of folks suffering under Stalinism may want to attend the Atlantic Theater Company’s production of “Dying for It,” a “free adaptation” by the British writer Moira Buffini of “The Suicide,” a 1928 play by Nikolai Erdman.

“Might have” are operative words here. Although the celebrated directors Vsevolod Meyerhold and Konstantin Stanislavksy both championed the play, plans to stage it were quashed by the authorities. It was not performed in Moscow until 1982, more than a decade after Erdman’s death, so it’s impossible to know how Russian audiences of the late 1920s might have reacted to this mordant satire about a man whose determination to kill himself wins him a host of fawning friends and admirers.

Audiences today, unfortunately, are not likely to find the play an unheralded treasure from the vaults. Although Ms. Buffini’s version has been given a handsome staging directed by Neil Pepe, this bleakly comic portrait of desperate lives in Soviet Russia feels wheezy and labored, ultimately about as much fun as a winter holiday in Siberia. (Grim footnote: Mr. Erdman was exiled there after being arrested on political grounds in 1933.)

The beleaguered central figure, Semyon Semyonovich Podeskalnikov (Joey Slotnick), has failed to find a niche in the new post-revolutionary Russia. Unemployed and ashamed to be living off the meager earnings of his wife, Masha (Jeanine Serralles), he despairs loudly of subsisting in such humiliation. The couple cannot even afford a real room in the grimy boardinghouse where they live — designed in atmospherically grisly detail by Walt Spangler, with paint peeling off the walls in sheets — but instead must settle for a corner of a common hallway.

When, after a bout of moaning over his sorry lot, Semyon suddenly disappears, Masha flies into a frenzy of apprehension, fearing that he has made good on his vague intimations about wanting to die. Before Semyon is discovered cowering under the bed, having simply wanted some peace and quiet — he’s got a nagging mother-in-law, Serafima (Mary Beth Peil) — Masha has alerted the neighbor upstairs, Alexander (CJ Wilson), to her husband’s suicidal threats.

Sensing an economic opportunity, of which there are few under Soviet strictures, Alexander begins spreading word of Semyon’s avowal, offering, for a few rubles, to introduce sundry acquaintances to this man determined to say “nyet” to life once and for all. Soon Semyon finds himself besieged by a series of fanatics, each eager to exploit his death for his or her own ends and ready to dictate an eloquent farewell note espousing his or her pet cause.

Aristarkh, played with amusing pedantic pomposity by Robert Stanton, urges Semyon to die a martyr to the oppression of the intelligentsia under Soviet rule. “Nowadays only the dead may say what the living think,” he fumes. Kleopatra, or Kiki, portrayed with simpering ripeness by the wonderful Clea Lewis, wants Semyon to end his life in the romantic spirit to which she is in ditsy thrall. “This is an age when love is despised, trampled,” she says histrionically, urging Semyon to “stand up for the soul” — and be sure to mention his great love, namely her, many times.

Among the other eager vultures are Peter Maloney’s nicely etched Father Yelpidy, a priest in whom piety vies with self-interest. He’s corralled by a desperate Masha to talk Semyon out of doing the deed and dutifully fulminates about the blasphemous act of self-slaughter. But he is really more interested in acquiring the biscuit and a cup of tea he was promised. And, oh, if Semyon really must kill himself, then make sure he puts in the note a bit about Russia as an “empty, godless universe,” so Father Yelpidy can make a fine example of him and preach a grabby sermon that will fill his empty church.

As you may have gathered, the play essentially turns on a single grim joke, repeated in a string of comic variations lampooning Russian types from the early 20th century. Here and there, it lurches into farce, as when Semyon pretends Masha is the cook so she won’t interrupt his flirtation with Kiki. But the antic passages are not really any funnier than the blunt-edged satirical point-making. Ms. Buffini, the author of the fine World War II drama “Gabriel,” also staged at the Atlantic, has streamlined “Dying” by trimming the roster of characters to 12 from 26, but her jokes tend toward the leaden. Masha, in her terror, moans to Mama, “What if he’s dead already?” Serafima’s retort: “I’ll kill him.” When Alexander’s girlfriend, Margarita (Mia Barron, oozing world-weariness), offers to organize a farewell party for Semyon, Alexander says, “In our classless world, she’s got class.”

A more galvanizing performance in the central role might help. Although Mr. Slotnick works mighty hard as Semyon tries and fails to learn the tuba (long story) and fends off the death-wishing assaults of his new acquaintances, his performance could be bigger. Semyon’s very Russian lugubriousness would be more preposterously funny if Mr. Slotnick gave it a little more oomph. But in general, more oomph is hardly what “Dying for It” needs. The humor tends to wallop you over the head, and then wallop you once more.

THEATER

Lyric Theater
On the Town - Leonard Bernstein

Hear a song from the show...

THEATER | THEATER REVIEW

Carried Away by the Sights! Lights! Nights!

‘On the Town' Revival Opens on Broadway

NYT Critics' Pick

By BEN BRANTLEYOCT. 16, 2014

And now, a show about sex that you can take the whole family to: the kids, the grandparents, even your sister the nun. That idea may sound kind of creepy, or (worse) dreary. But I assure you that the jubilant revival of “On the Town,” which opened Thursday night at the Lyric Theater, is anything but.

On the contrary, this merry mating dance of a musical feels as fresh as first sunlight as it considers the urgent quest of three sailors to find girls and get, uh, lucky before their 24-hour shore leave is over. If there’s a leer hovering over “On the Town,” a seemingly limp 1944 artifact coaxed into pulsing new life by the director John Rando and the choreographer Joshua Bergasse, it’s the leer of an angel.

The best-known song from this show — which has music by Leonard Bernstein, with book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green — describes its setting as “a helluva town.” But the town in question — “New York, New York,” if you didn’t know — feels closer to heaven here.

Designed in a spectrum of jelly-bean hues that makes vintage Technicolor look pallid, this is a parallel-universe New York in which hectic urban life acquires the pace and grace of a storybook ballet. It’s a bustling, jostling cartoon that also floats like a swan. And it feels right that the show’s central object of desire, a subway beauty queen pursued by our leading sailor (the wonderful Tony Yazbeck), is portrayed by a principal dancer from the New York City Ballet, Megan Fairchild.

New York — I mean the real New York, both back in the day and today — is also a world capital of reinvention, where what was once regarded as terminally passé can surface anew as the hottest, latest thing. “On the Town” has long been looked upon with the amused but distant fondness reserved for fading picture postcards.

Sure, it felt irresistibly young and sassy when it opened during the entertainment-hungry World War II years, with its talented team of newcomers. In addition to Comden, Green and Bernstein, there was the rising choreographer Jerome Robbins, and they were all still in their 20s when they put the show together. Few things age faster, though, than the blatantly youthful. (Try watching a Taylor Swift video in a decade or so.) And the two Broadway revivals before now, in 1971 and 1998, had short and impoverished lives. Even the fondly remembered 1949 movie version, which starred Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, now looks winceably antiseptic.

But Mr. Rando, whose Broadway career includes “Urinetown” (yay) and “The Wedding Singer” (meh), has a loving affinity for this material that dispels the scent of mothballs. He has directed “On the Town” twice before — an Encores! concert version at City Center in 2008 and, in 2013, for the Barrington Stage Company, in Pittsfield, Mass.

I caught the Barrington production and admired how it restored the libido to “On the Town.” It was one of the highlights of my summer, a perfect warm-weather diversion in a small, bucolic theater. But the news that it would be coming to Broadway — and to the cavernous Lyric Theater, once home to a singing Spider-Man — gave me pause. Frothy charm can go flabby when it gains weight.

Yet Mr. Rando’s “On the Town” has grown up quite nicely, thank you, with much of its original cast not only intact but also improved. Every element has been heightened in just the right way, a delicate achievement when you consider the heightening that’s aspired to.

For “On the Town” traffics in two kinds of exaggerations, that of the earthy, even dirty cartoon and of the gossamer romance of poets. This reflects the bicultural nature of Robbins and Bernstein, who belonged equally to Broadway and the concert hall.

Some of its numbers, in which comic archetypes cozy up or collide, could be placed directly into the cel of an animated Looney Tunes short. Others could slide seamlessly onto the stage of the Paris Opera.

This “On the Town” makes you forget that such contrasting sensibilities could ever be considered irreconcilable, at least in the world of musical comedy. Beowulf Boritt’s simple sliding sets, Jess Goldstein’s costumes and Jason Lyons’s lighting evoke the city as a super candy store in which all manner of sweets are on offer. What’s surprising is how fluent the entire cast is in both the high and low languages they are required to speak.

Start with Mr. Yazbeck as Gabey, the most unworldly of the three shipmates who invade New York. He’s a greener-than-alfalfa farm boy, so clumsy that he can’t say hello to a stranger without muffing it.

But when he looks inward, to his lovelorn heart, he becomes a supremely eloquent dancer, a fusion of Astaire’s elegance and Kelly’s bounce. And he has a yearning voice to match, plied to swoony effect in ballads like the great “Lonely Town.”

The way Gabey dances is an idealized but very specific version of his character’s wants and needs. And so it is for his chums, Chip (Jay Armstrong Johnson), the nerdy one, and Ozzie (Clyde Alves), the macho one. In pas de trois, they all dance the same steps, yet their approaches feel as individual as fingerprints.

Throughout the show, which includes the dreamiest dream ballets I’ve seen in years, Mr. Bergasse (best known for the television show “Smash”) maintains this rare feeling of idiosyncrasy in harmony. Similarly, he’s captured the Robbins spirit, but stamped it with his own vivid signature.

Women found themselves newly in charge of the home front during World War II, so it feels appropriate that the soul mates of Chip and Ozzie should be such exuberantly take-charge gals. As Hildy, the forthright taxi driver who hijacks Chip to her place, Alysha Umphress is a red-hot mama who sings double entendres with a prurience-proof, bebop gusto.

A paradigm of refined comic exaggeration, Elizabeth Stanley is Claire de Loon, the anthropologist who finds her perfect primitive man in Ozzie. Her singing voice, which slides between operatic trills and lowdown purrs, is a breezy shorthand for the show’s double edge.

COMMENTS

As for Ms. Fairchild, whom Gabey falls for when he sees her picture as this month’s Miss Turnstiles, she looks and talks like the sugar-sweet girl next door that all-American servicemen once dreamed of. When she dances, though, she’s a goddess, that girl as she appears in their dreams.

The large supporting cast embraces both virtuoso comic shtick artists — including that cutup par excellence Jackie Hoffman, along with Stephen DeRosa, Michael Rupert, Phillip Boykin and Allison Guinn — and a corps de ballet that seems to be dancing on air, even in dirty old Times Square. If the show could still use some tightening, especially of its slapstick riffs, I never checked my watch.

That’s partly because there’s always that music — ah, that music. Under the direction of James Moore, Bernstein’s score belongs equally to heaven and earth. It is by turns jazzy (“I Can Cook, Too”), parodistic (“Carried Away”) and jaunty (“Lucky to Be Me”). And then, with an uplift that takes your breath away, it flies up into an empyrean where sexual itches are transformed into great romantic love and a concrete-hard city feels as soft as a bed of clouds.

THEATER

American Airlines Theater
The Real Think - Tom Stoppard

"It's all about the moment you stop thinking and start feeling."

"A thoroughly excellent and tuneful version of Tom Stoppard's brilliant play about love and fidelity." —Mark Kennedy, Associated Press

"There is little in contemporary drama that's as much fun as Tom Stoppard's dialogue." —Jesse Green, New York Magazine

"FOUR STARS. Stoppard's love story melts our hearts." —David Cote, Time Out New York

The Real Thing tells the story of Henry, a successful playwright who is unhappily married to Charlotte, the lead actress in his current play about a marriage on the verge of collapse. When Henry’s affair with their friend Annie threatens to destroy his own marriage, he discovers that life has started imitating art. After Annie leaves her husband so she and Henry can begin a new life together, he can’t help but wonder whether their love is fiction or the real thing.

Two-time Golden Globe® nominee Ewan McGregor is Henry, a playwright not so happily married to Charlotte (Tony Award® winner Cynthia Nixon), the lead actress in his play about a marriage on the verge of collapse. When Henry’s affair with their friend Annie (Academy Award® nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal) threatens to destroy his own marriage, he discovers that life has started imitating art. After Annie leaves her husband so she and Henry can begin a new life together, he can’t help but wonder whether their love is fiction or the real thing.

Delectably witty and deeply affecting, The Real Thing takes a daring glimpse at relationships, fidelity and the passions that often blur our perception of love. Helmed by critically acclaimed director Sam Gold (Roundabout’s Picnic, Seminar) and also starring Drama Desk nominee Josh Hamilton (The Coast of Utopia, “American Horror Story: Coven”), this Tony Award®-winning play by Tom Stoppard (The Coast of Utopia, Arcadia) first seduced audiences in London and New York nearly 30 years ago, when it was called “not only Stoppard’s most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years” (Frank Rich, The New York Times).

LINCOLN CENTER

Avery Fisher Hall
New York Philharmonic

Juanjo Mena - Conductor
Daniil Trifonov - Piano

Rimsky-Korsakov - Capriccio Espagnol
Rachmaninoff - Piano Concerto No. 1
Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 6, Pathetique

Watch Trifonov discuss this performance

Finding Trifonov several months ago at a Carnegie Hall concert was a treat.  He is considered the current, youngest, hottest performer at this time.  Interestingly, so is Lang Lang, who we recently saw perform.  At any rate, tonight will be special.  The sound of the orchestra, the beauty of the music, and watching this 24 year old Russian play will be a hoot.