LINCOLN CENTER

David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic

Christopher Eschenbach - Conductor
Baiba Skride - Violin

Dvorak - Carnival Overture
Bartok - Violin Concerto No. 2
Dvorak - Symphony No. 8

“The Dvořák curtain-raiser blazed with an intensity that blew you back in your seat,” The New York Times said of the New York Philharmonic performing the Carnival Overture. Plus, Bohemian flavors and gypsy tunes abound in Dvořák’s beloved Symphony No. 8 and Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto, featuring acclaimed interpreter Baiba Skride, “a passionate, heart-on-sleeve player” (The Guardian).

Carnival Overture (1891)

Bursting with spirit and energy, Carnival is the second of Dvořák’s three concert overtures (the other two are In Nature’s Realm and Othello, originally titled “Nature, Life, and Love”). The running thread among them is a theme representing the life force, which the composer called “nature,” and which has the power “to create and sustain life, but also, in its negative form, could destroy it,” according to John Clapham’s study of the composer. Dvořák’s own commentary for Carnival describes the music perfectly: “The lonely, contemplative wanderer reaches the city at nightfall, where a carnival is in full swing. On every side is heard the clangor of instruments, mingled with shouts of joy and the unrestrained hilarity of people giving vent to their feelings in their songs and dance tunes.” The vibrant Bohemian flavors so integral to Dvořák’s music depict this joyful scene with bright orchestral colors and rhythms.

BÉLA BARTÓK (1881–1945)

Violin Concerto No. 2 (1938)
Symphony No. 8 (1889)

Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto was commissioned by and dedicated to Zoltán Székely, who requested a “traditional” concerto; but the composer was more in the mood to write a set of variations. Ever resourceful, Bartók managed to please himself and the violinist by incorporating variations into the structure of the work. The concerto’s first movement, which delivers not only gorgeous melodies, but also spicy gypsy pulses, is in the style of a verbunkos (a Hungarian recruiting dance intended to attract new soldiers to service) with an astounding cadenza. The second movement, beginning serenely with an assist from the harp, presents a set of six variations on a peasant tune — no doubt one Bartók had notated on one of his folk song–collecting field trips. The Allegro finale is a variation of the first movement, reinventing all its themes as rambunctious folk dances…more variations. As the composer told Székely: “I managed to outwit you; I wrote variations after all.” A brilliant vehicle for both soloist and orchestra, the concerto offers plenty of opportunities for virtuosic display and audience dazzling. (Thirty years separated Bartók’s two violin concertos; he had composed the No. 1 in 1908 for the young violinist Stefi Geyer (1888–1956), the object of his first, but unrequited, love. No one knew that this work existed until 1956, when it surfaced after both Bartók and Geyer had died.)

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841–1904)

With his next-to-last symphony Dvořák struck out in a new direction, both in terms of loosening formal Germanic structures and expressing his identity as a Bohemian composer. His peaceful summer retreat at Vysoká no doubt served as the inspiration for the dazzling passages that, after a pensive introduction in a minor key, seem to cascade one after another in the bright opening movement, and for the Bohemian flavors that come into play in the lovely Adagio. A waltz-like rhythm can be heard in the third movement, and the Finale, introduced by a trumpet fanfare, is a theme with variations that features exuberant brass calls before coming to a rousing conclusion. Dvořák once admitted the ease with which he could create a seemingly endless stream of tunes: “Melodies simply pour out of me” — something that is certainly evident in this symphony. Brahms, who was ever a Dvořák “cheerleader,” quipped about his contemporary’s music: “I would be happy if one of his passing thoughts occurred to me as a main idea.”

LINCOLN CENTER

Rose Theater
Christian McBride/Henry Butler, Steven Bernstein & The Hot 9

Two world class bands explore the relationship between jazz and American popular song. The double-bill is headlined by GRAMMY® Award-winning bassist Christian McBride, who first composed for big band in 1995 as a commission for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

Now a leader of his own GRAMMY® Award-winning Big Band, featuring a staggering and diverse lineup of top musicians, McBride simultaneously shows off his compositional talent and unmatched ability to drive a band from behind the bass. The other portion of the concert features Henry Butler, Steven Bernstein & The Hot 9, featuring New Orleans piano virtuoso Henry Butler. Described by The New York Times as “both historically aware and fully prepared to cut loose,” this exhilarating group introduces the hot jazz of years past to the endless possibilities of the modern jazz landscape.

Notes on the Program

By Bridget Arnwine

Jazz is an original stitch in the fabric of American popular music. It transcends per- ception and categorization in spite of its firmly established roots in the African- American experience. The music is improvisation from and for the soul. It swings, bops, and lindy- hops through Cotton Clubs, rags, and fuses time, gives birth to cool, and serenades Paris in springtime all without ever losing the core of its identity. Before American popular music ever had a name, jazz was it, and on Friday and Saturday, February 26 and 27, 2016, two highly celebrated bands will demonstrate jazz’s omnipresence in what has become the great American songbook.

Christian McBride is a five-time Grammy Award winning bassist, composer, arranger, bandleader, producer, educator, and radio host of SiriusXM Satellite’s The Low-down: Conversations with Christian and Jazz Night in America, a radio and web-based initiative resulting from a partnership between WBGO, NPR, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1972, McBride is one of the most recorded musi- cians on the scene today. With more than 300 recording credits to his name, he has performed alongside a diverse group of musicians including Bobby Watson, Chick Corea, Joshua Redman, Diana Krall, Pat Metheny, Benny Green, George Duke, Paul McCartney, Lalah Hathaway, Roy Haynes, Sting, Herbie Hancock, The Roots, D’Angelo, Kathleen Battle, Sonny Rollins, Betty Carter, the inimitable James Brown, and his wife, vocalist Melissa Walker, to name a few.

In 1989, McBride moved from his native Philadelphia to New York City, where he planned to pursue classical studies at the acclaimed Juilliard School. It wasn’t long before he began working, taking a position in Bobby Watson’s band. By 1990, McBride made his recording debut as a sideman on trumpeter Wallace Roney’s Obsession. He debuted as a leader five years later on his recording Gettin’ To It (Verve Records).

In 1998, McBride received a commission from the Portland (ME) Arts Society and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to compose what became “The Movement, Revisited,” a four-movement suite dedicated to the work of civil rights icons Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Muhammad Ali, and Malcolm X.

In 2000, McBride assembled the Christian McBride Band, a funk/fusion group consist- ing of saxophonist Ron Blake, keyboardist Geoffrey Keezer, and drummer Terreon Gully. He continued to work and record as a sideman though the group released two recordings: Vertical Vision and Live at Tonic. McBride went on to front several other inno- vative groups including an award-winning big band, the Inside Straight quintet, and a trio that features rising star pianist Christian Sands and drummer Ulysses Owens, Jr. With a career that now spans more than 30 years, McBride has earned a place as one of music’s best and most thoughtful musicians.

Critics are also celebrating New Orleans jazz and blues pianist Henry Butler, trum- peter Steve Bernstein, and the Hot 9 for their high-energy approach to bringing the past and present together.
Butler, a musician well-versed in the history of piano music and the New Orleans style of playing, released his debut recording, Fivin’ Around, in 1986. The professional relationship between Bernstein and Butler developed in 1998 after the trumpeter hired the pianist to be part of his touring band. The two reunited in 2011 when Butler per- formed as a special guest in Bernstein’s nine-piece Millennial Territory Orchestra. When Butler rejoined Bernstein’s Orchestra the following year, the two decided to explore what they could develop together musically, giving way to the evolution of the Hot 9. The group released Viper’s Drag in 2014, the album’s title a nod to acclaimed stride pianist Thomas “Fats” Waller.

Though he was born blind, Butler is also an avid photographer. His work was included in an exhibition titled Sight Unseen: International Photography by Blind Artists. 

LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
Great Performers: Freiburg Baroque Orchestra

Mozart - Arias from Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Le nozze di Figaro

Mozart - Clarinet Concerto

Mozart - Symphony No. 36 (“Linz”)

"In this bountiful Mozart program, the Gramophone Award–winning Freiburg Baroque Orchestra mixes Mozart’s vivacious “Paris” Symphony and lyrical Clarinet Concerto with arias from his most popular opera. “Utterly absorbing” (Guardian) baritone Christian Gerhaher performs arias from Mozart’s most popular operas, and the lyrical Clarinet Concerto complements the vocal works’ rich conversational tone."

RECITAL

Marble Collegiate Church
Noontime Organ Recital Series

PERFORMANCE

Merkin Hall
Marble Collegiate Choir

We love our choir at Marble Collegiate.  Every single Sunday they sing at the highest, musical level.  They really are good.

The Marble Choir
Kenneth Dake - Director

"The Marble Choir under the direction of Kenneth Dake presents The Road Home, a concert of poignant songs about searching for home, returning home, and hoping for an everlasting home. The concert features works of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Paulus, Hubert Parry, and Ken Medema, among others. The evening will also include a brief video presentation by representatives from Habitat for Humanity. Marble Church launches a partnership with Habitat to build a house for a family in Queens, New York in 2016. The Marble Choir is a nationally acclaimed 24-voice professional choir known for its eclectic repertoire and artistic excellence. Inspired by sublime music with a profound message, we are pleased to share in Habitat's vision to realize a world in which everyone has a decent place to live and the opportunity to find home."

THEATER

The Pearl Theater
C.S. Lewis OnStage: The Most Reluctant Convert

MAX MCLEAN AS C.S. LEWIS!

It was a one man show lasting over an hour filled with powerful thoughts showing Lewis's transformation from an atheist into a Christian.

"For the first time, Max McLean takes audiences on a fascinating theatrical adventure as C.S. Lewis, tracing his journey from atheism to belief in C.S. Lewis: The Most Reluctant Convert. Adapted from Lewis’ writings, Max McLean inhabits Lewis from the death of his mother, his estranged relationship with his father and the experiences that led him from vigorous debunker to the most accessible and eloquent Christian intellectual of the 20th Century. The Most Reluctant Convert is 80 fast-paced minutes brimming with Lewis’ entertaining wit and thought-provoking insight. One of the most engaging personalities of our age comes to life on stage in C.S. Lewis: The Most Reluctant Convert."

RECITAL

The Morgan Library and Museum
George London Foundation Recital Series

This is a singing contest.  It's very similar to the Metropolitan Opera's National Auditions but it's much smaller and much more intimate.

Our seats were quit close.

Since it is a competition, the performance becomes a two hour presentation of "candy-stick", sparkling pieces sung by some really talented singers.

The winners of the 45th annual George London Foundation Awards Competition for young American and Canadian opera singers were announced at the conclusion of the competition's final round this evening, which took place in a front of an audience at Gilder Lehrman Hall at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. 

A total of $73,000 was given in awards. After three days of preliminary auditions during which 85 singers were heard, 23 were selected as finalists. Of these, six were selected as winners of George London Awards of $10,000 each and nine were given George London Foundation Encouragement Awards of $1,000 each. The remaining eight finalists received $500 Honorable Mention awards.

George London Foundation President Nora London, center, with 2016 George London Award winners (left to right) A.J. Glueckert, Claudia Rosenthal, David Pershall, Kirsten MacKinnon, Antonina Chehovska, and Steven LaBrie. 

GEORGE LONDON AWARDS ($10,000 each):
Antonina Chehovska, soprano (29, Ukrainian-born) - George London-Leonie Rysanek Award
A.J. Glueckert, tenor (29, Portland, OR) - George London-Kirsten Flagstad Award (sponsored by the New York Community Trust) for a potential Wagnerian singer
Steven LaBrie, baritone (27, Dallas, TX) - George London Award in memory of Lloyd Rigler
Kirsten MacKinnon, soprano (25, Squamish, BC, Canada) - George London Award sponsored by Liliane and Robert Brochu (for a Canadian singer)
David Pershall, baritone (30, Temple, TX) - George London Award sponsored by Lloyd E. Rigler - Lawrence E. Deutsch Foundation
Claudia Rosenthal, soprano (29, Scarsdale, NY) - George London Award sponsored by The Lissner Charitable Fund

GEORGE LONDON FOUNDATION ENCOURAGEMENT AWARDS ($1,000 each):
Justin Austin, baritone (25, German-born) (In memory of Robert Jacobson)
Jared Bybee, baritone (29, Modesto, CA) (In memory of Herbert J. Frank, sponsored by David Shustak)
Emily D'Angelo, mezzo-soprano (21, Toronto, Canada) (Sponsored by Liliane and Robert Brochu, for a Canadian singer)
Cecelia Hall, mezzo-soprano (31, Durham, NC) (In memory of Norma Newton)
John Matthew Myers, tenor (27, Lake Forest, CA) (Sponsored by the Lloyd E. Rigler - Lawrence E. Deutsch Foundation)
Jacqueline Piccolino, soprano (24, Chicago, IL) (Sponsored by Henry and Diana Asher)
Colin Ramsey, bass (26, Greenwich, CT) (Sponsored by Sarah Billinghurst Solomon)
Michael Sumuel, bass-baritone (30, Odessa, TX) (In memory of Jaclyn Rendall Elyn, sponsored by Mark Elyn)
John Viscardi, baritone (32, New York, NY) (In memory of Theodore Uppman) 
This year's panel of judges included soprano Harolyn Blackwell, former Metropolitan Opera administrator Alfred F. Hubay, George London Foundation President Nora London, tenor and voice professor George Shirley, baritone Richard Stilwell (who won a George London Award at the first competition, in 1971), and mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade. The competition pianist was renowned collaborative pianist Craig Rutenberg. 

Since 1971, the annual competition of The George London Foundation for Singers has been giving its George London Awards, and a total of more than $2 million, to an outstanding roster of young American and Canadian opera singers who have gone on to international stardom - the list of past winners includes Christine Brewer, Joyce DiDonato, Renée Fleming, Christine Goerke, Catherine Malfitano, James Morris, Matthew Polenzani, Sondra Radvanovsky, Neil Shicoff, and Dawn Upshaw. 

One of the oldest vocal competitions in the United States and Canada, the George London Foundation Awards Competition offers among the most substantial awards. As is seldom the case in musical competitions, no fee is charged to the applicants or competitors, a pianist is provided for the competition rounds, and prizes are awarded immediately.

The George London Foundation's 2015-16 season continues with the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the recital series, as well as the final duo recital of the season:
George London Foundation Celebration Concert: Twenty Years of Recitals In Collaboration with the Morgan on Wednesday, April 6, 2016, at 7:00 PM. Renowned Canadian tenor Ben Heppner is master of ceremonies for the starry event that features eight George London Award winners who are among opera's biggest stars, and one recent winner: Ailyn Pérez, soprano; Sondra Radvanovsky, soprano; Christine Brewer, soprano; Susanne Mentzer, mezzo-soprano; Matthew Polenzani, tenor; James Morris, bass-baritone; Eric Owens, bass-baritone; and Brandon Cedel, bass-baritone. Joining the singers on the recital stage will be two of the opera world's finest pianists, Ken Noda and Craig Rutenberg. The event also includes a festive post-concert reception.

Dimitri Pittas, tenor, and Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo-soprano, with Christopher Cano, piano. Dimitri Pittas is a 2004 George London Award winner; Jennifer Johnson Cano won her award in 2014. Sunday, May 15, 2016, at 4:00 PM.

The goal of the London Foundation, the support and nurturing of young singers, was an abiding interest of the great American bass-baritone George London, who devoted a great part of the time and energy of his later years to this purpose. "Remembering his difficult road to success, George wanted to devise a way to make the road a little easier for future generations of singers," said George London Foundation President Nora London. Initially created under the auspices of the National Opera Institute, the George London Awards program has been administered since 1990 directly by the Foundation as a living legacy to George London's own exceptional talent and generosity.

RECITAL

Marble Collegiate Church
Noontime Organ Recital Series

RECITAL

The Morgan Library and Museum
Young Concert Artists Series

Yin-Chin Zhou - Piano

Bach - English Suite No.4 in F Major. BWV 809
Chopin - Nocturne in B Major, Op. 62, No.1
Rachmaninoff - From Preludes, Op. 23
Prokofiev - Sonata No. 8 in B-flat Major, Op. 84

THEATER

Symphony Space
The Winter's Tale

"The first season of the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company Live promises an exceptional series of plays broadcast to cinemas from London’s Garrick Theatre over the course of a year.

The season begins with The Winter’s Tale. Shakespeare's timeless tragicomedy of obsession and redemption is reimagined in a new production co-directed by Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh, following their triumphant staging of Macbeth in Manchester and Manhattan.

King Leontes appears to have everything: power, wealth, a loving family and friends. But sexual jealousy sets in motion a chain of events with tragic consequences…

The Winter’s Tale will star a remarkable group of actors, featuring Judi Dench as Paulina, alongside Tom Bateman (Florizel), Jessie Buckley (Perdita), Hadley Fraser (Polixenes), Miranda Raison(Hermione) and Kenneth Branagh as Leontes."

THEATER

Circle in the Square
Fun Home

Review: ‘Fun Home’ at the Circle in the Square Theater

“Fun Home” knows where you live. Granted, it’s unlikely that many details of your childhood exactly resemble those of the narrator of this extraordinary musical, which pumps oxygenating fresh air into the cultural recycling center that is Broadway.

Yet this impeccably shaded portrait of a girl and her father, which opened on Sunday night at the Circle in the Square Theater, occupies the place where we all grew up, and will never be able to leave. That’s the shifting landscape where our parents, whether living or dead, will always reign as the most familiar and elusive people we will ever encounter.

Adapted from Alison Bechdel’s fine graphic novel of a memoir, with an incisive book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and heart-gripping music by Jeanine Tesori, “Fun Home” might be described as a universal detective story. Set in three ages of one woman’s life (embodied by three perfectly matched, first-rate actresses), it tries to solve the sort of classic mystery that keeps grown-ups in analysis for decades: Who are these strange people who made me?

The focus of that question here is an especially knotty case. Meet Bruce (Michael Cerveris), who teaches high school English, restores old houses and runs a funeral home in a small Pennsylvania town. As the husband of Helen (Judy Kuhn) and a father of three, Bruce is as divided personally as he is professionally, a fastidious upholder of the perfect-family facade who picks up young men (all played by Joel Perez) on the down low.

Sounds like the stuff of a pulpy Lifetime movie, doesn’t it, or of a choked-up, closure-seeking best seller? But while “Fun Home” is likely to keep you wet-eyed for much of its intermission-free 100 minutes, it is also wryly and compellingly cleareyed — or as cleareyed as hindsight allows, when it’s your own family you’re scrutinizing.

The focus keeps changing in “Fun Home,” directed with vivid precision and haunting emotional ambiguity by Sam Gold, as do the time-stopping frames of the woman whose memory we inhabit. That’s Alison (Beth Malone), a 43-year-old graphic artist who is using her pen to draw her past into perspective. Or trying to. The objects she sees in the rearview mirror are both closer and farther away than they appear.

She has two vital accomplices in this task: the child (Sydney Lucas) and the college student (Emily Skeggs) she once was. These earlier versions of Alison kept journals, trying to make sense of a world that felt slightly off-kilter for many reasons, including her own nascent attraction to other women.

The adult Alison is seen peering over the shoulders (literally) of her former selves, wincing at what she was. She also conjures up the carefully restored, museumlike old house where she lived with her brothers (Zell Steele Morrow and Oscar Williams); the Oberlin College campus, where she fell in love with a fellow student named Joan (a spot-on Roberta Colindrez), and the lonely drawing desk where Alison works to give shape and substance to her ghosts.

I can’t think of a recent musical — or play, for that matter — that has done a better job at finding theatrical expression for the wayward dynamics of remembering. That includes the now-you-see-now-you-don’t-aspect of David Zinn’s inspired in-the-round set, in which furniture materializes through trapdoors, as well as the ruthless clarity and sudden, obscuring dimness of Ben Stanton’s lighting.

But most important is the music, a career high for Ms. Tesori (“Violet,” “Caroline, or Change”), which captures both the nagging persistence of memory and its frustrating insubstantiality, with leitmotifs that tease and shimmer. (John Clancy did the nuanced orchestrations.) The music is woven so intricately into Ms. Kron’s time-juggling script that you’ll find yourself hard pressed to recall what exactly was said and what was sung.

Every member of the cast is fluent in this musical language, blessedly never pushing for effect. Not that there isn’t room for the occasional show-off number. How could it be otherwise when there are children on the stage?

Mr. Morrow, Mr. Williams and Ms. Lucas present a showstopping, casket-riding commercial for Bruce’s funeral home that the Bechdel children whip up while hanging out in the mortuary. They are also invaluable participants in a later sequence that transforms Alison’s clan into a perfectly in-sync, finger-snapping musical group along the lines of the Partridge Family, that most wholesome of 1970s pop bands.

These are the show’s only pastiche numbers, with Ms. Tesori using slick, prepackaged forms to suggest a child’s wistful longings for a tidy, happy existence that real life can never match.

Otherwise, the score stays close to the fragile hearts and minds of its characters as they are.

As befits a work that is both a coming out (on several levels) and a coming-of-age story, “Fun Home” features two exultant hymns of sexual awakening. They are performed with spirit and style by Ms. Skeggs (on Alison’s first night with Joan) and the incomparable Ms. Lucas (in a fabulous ode to a handsome delivery woman glimpsed in a coffee shop). And the always excellent Ms. Kuhn, whose Helen is shaped by a resentment she can barely afford to express, gives full life to a lacerating 11 o’clock ballad of repressed emotions set free.

Much of the music, though, has the interrogative restlessness of thought in pursuit of certainty, and the ambivalent mix of anger and affection that pervades our relationships with our nearest and dearest. There’s a delicate dissonance in the multiple-part songs, which are all the more affecting for their implicit yearning for harmony.

Mr. Cerveris, an unforgettably fierce Sweeney Todd in John Doyle’s 2005 revival, rises to the challenge of the show’s toughest role. Bruce isn’t just a man with a double life, but a character shaped with love and exasperation, recrimination and guilt by Alison’s recollection of him. As played by Mr. Cerveris, he is both irresistible and forbidding, warmly accessible and icily opaque.

“A family tragicomic” is the subtitle of the book by Ms. Bechdel on which this show is based. And it’s hard to strike the right balance in bringing that oxymoronic quality to the stage. I fell hard for “Fun Home” when I first saw it at the Public Theater, and had worried that this rare beauty might be damaged in its relocation.

But this production has only improved, not least because of its having to be reimagined for a theater-in-the-round space. (The Public production was on a proscenium stage.) The audience becomes, more than ever, part of the Bechdel family circle. For better or worse — and for me shows this cathartic are only for the better — we’re home.

LINCOLN CENTER

David Koch Theater
New York City Ballet

La Sylphide
Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2

The most recent of the enduring classic story ballets to enter NYCB’s repertory, Peter Martins’ staging of August Bournonville’s La Sylphide is filled with passion and unrequited love. Returning to the stage from its Spring 2015 premiere for eight performances, this celebrated romance tells the tale of love led astray and features the elusive fairy all little ballerinas dream of one day becoming and a diabolical witch who preys upon the conceits of an unsuspecting man. Paired for the occasion is Balanchine’s Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, an ebullient outpouring of classical virtuosity with tiaraed tiers of corps de ballet dancers.



A Note from Peter Martins:

La Sylphide is the first ballet that I ever saw. I danced in it when I was a student at the Royal Danish Ballet School, and more than a decade later I graduated to the role of James, the male lead. Working my way up through various corps roles, I came to know this ballet very well, and whenever I look at the cozy domestic scene that provides the setting for Act I, it’s as if I’m staring into my own living room.

August Bournonville, the fountainhead of classical Danish choreography, saw the Paris Opera Ballet perform its production of La Sylphide in 1834, and for two francs and some change, he bought a copy of the libretto and commissioned a new score from Herman Løvenskjold, who happens to be my mother’s sister’s husband’s grandfather. Two years later, the Royal Danish Ballet premiered Bournonville’s version of La Sylphide, and in an unbroken tradition, the work has remained in the company’s repertory ever since.

Over the years several descendants of the Royal Danish Ballet have staged their own versions of La Syphide. In my staging, which was originally created for the Pennsylvania Ballet in 1985, I chose not to change anything, there is virtually nothing of me in the production. I simply went back to the essential La Sylphide. This is the Romantic ballet that I was brought up on; this is Bournonville as I know it. Oh yes, I did contribute something—I eliminated the intermission!


Balanchine first staged Tschaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto for the American Ballet Caravan in May 1941. Under the sponsorship of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs under the Roosevelt administration (Nelson A. Rockefeller, coordinator), the Caravan undertook a tour of South America, performing in every country except Paraguay and Bolivia. It was felt that a ballet should be presented demonstrating the pure classic dance. Instead of reviving an actual classic, Balanchine created a work in the style of Petipa and the Petersburg tradition. The decor, by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, showed the Neva, with the Peter-Paul Fortress, framed in the Imperial blue and white of the Winter Palace. Ballet Imperial was revived in 1964 by New York City Ballet with new decor by Rouben Ter-Arutunian, who followed a similar visual approach. In 1973, Balanchine felt that the allusion to Imperial Russia was outmoded, and that the ballet could stand on its relation to the music alone. The title was changed, the decor dropped, the costumes simplified, and some of the pantomime in the second movement altered, but the choreography as a whole remained the same. Tschaikovsky’s regal Piano Concerto No. 2 is often overshadowed by his First Piano Concerto, one of the most frequently performed concertos ever written. But Piano Concerto No. 2 has had many champions, including Balanchine, who was drawn to this immense, romantic work.

THEATER

Bedlam Theater Group
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

We saw this production two years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.  We are returning.

Review: A Whirlwind of Delicious Gossip in ‘Sense & Sensibility’

Pray do not be alarmed, gentle readers, but I am here to tell you that Jane Austen has been pumped full of helium. Now you might think that the injection of such an alien element would warp, if not altogether explode, that fabled “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory” on which Austen said she worked.

Yet the Bedlam theater company’s version of her “Sense & Sensibility,” which opened on Thursday night at the Gym at Judson, expands and magnifies Austen’s delicate comic worldview without cracking a single teacup. First presented for a short run in repertory in 2014, this enchanting romp of a play has returned on its own, with a few adjustments, but with its buoyant spirits, cunning stagecraft and enlivening insights intact.

As adapted for the stage by Kate Hamill and directed by Eric Tucker, “Sense & Sensibility” might be described as Jane Austen for those who don’t usually like Jane Austen, finding her work too reserved for lively entertainment. Yet I would imagine that even fanatical Janeites, as her most devoted admirers are known, will not take offense, once they get used to this production’s audaciously high energy level.

For while the Bedlam “Sense & Sensibility” may seem to take daring liberties with its source’s quiet sensibility, it never violates the original novel’s uncommon sense — of values, of society, of human frailties. Austen’s abiding themes emerge in heightened and often illuminating relief here.

Given that your response to the early scenes will probably be surprised, riotous laughter, you are equally likely to find yourself shedding discreet tears — the kind that cry out for cambric handkerchiefs — by the end. This misty-eyed state is induced not just by Austen’s artistry in setting to rights a world at odds with itself, but also by a troupe’s triumphant joy in giving such defiantly theatrical form to a literary narrative.

The company of players, in this case, numbers 10. While these performers are required to embody several times their weight in assorted characters, this is an epic cast by the standards of Bedlam, whose vibrant productions of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Shaw’s “Saint Joan” featured skeletal ensembles of four.

But “Sense & Sensibility” shares the company’s signature approach of do-it-yourself resourcefulness, by which crowded and jostling landscapes are created through minimal means. As designed by John McDermott (set), Les Dickert (lighting) and Angela Huff (costumes), this production allows us to see Austen’s world taking shape before our eyes, a process that includes watching its thoroughly contemporary cast shimmy back into the era of Regency England.

We first encounter them all as themselves, drifting between the audience and the visible dressing area at one end of the stage. They assemble, still in civilian clothes, for a rowdy, rave-style dance that, by degrees, segues into something like a country ball gavotte. (Alexandra Beller is the choreographer.) They wriggle out of their early-21st-century clothes and into freehand approximations of early-19th-century garments.

And suddenly, they’re all talking at once, wildly and obsessively — to us, to one another, to themselves. What we’re hearing is a whirlwind of gossip, of voices bearing conflicting truths and falsehoods about love affairs and scandals, independent incomes and inherited real estate.

Such gossip is the architect of Austen’s society. And perhaps the most ingenious element of Mr. Tucker’s production is its use of gossip as the force that shapes the destinies of Austen’s characters. No matter how private the scene, there are always eavesdroppers nearby, waiting to spread and reconfigure the latest rumors.

The primary subjects of those rumors are the female members of the family newly dispossessed by the death of old John Dashwood (John Russell). There are his widow, Mrs. Dashwood (Samantha Steinmetz), and their three daughters: Elinor (endowed with a wonderfully anxious equanimity by Andrus Nichols), the eldest and most sensible of the lot; Marianne (a delightfully volatile Ms. Hamill), the determined romantic; and Margaret (Jessica Frey), the youngest.

Then there are the uncertain suitors of Elinor and Marianne, who include the diffident Edward Ferrars (Jason O’Connell, who doubles hilariously as his character’s loutish younger brother), the roguish John Willoughby (John Russell) and the stalwart Colonel Brandon (Edmund Lewis). Before the story’s end, hearts will be pledged and broken in various combinations among these and other characters, with every permutation attended by a chorus of kibitzers.

In addition to assuming new identities at the drop of a wig or a pair of pince-nez, the cast members are responsible for pushing the scenery into place. (The ensemble is rounded out, with unstinting verve, by Laura Baranik, Stephan Wolfert and Gabra Zackman.)

Nearly everything in Mr. McDermott’s set — tables, chairs, a settee, French doors and trellises — is on casters. And furniture is being constantly rearranged (often at dizzying speed) to denote not only changes of place but also of emotional temperature.

Moments of public humiliation are expanded into nightmare sequences in which revolving furniture suggests a world spinning off its axis. Even quiet tête-à-têtes are punctuated by the expressive repositioning of the chairs in which the speakers sit.

The overall effect is of a tidal social flux coursing beneath the stationary drawing rooms that Austen’s characters inhabit. Even more than Ang Lee’s fine 1995 film of “Sense and Sensibility,” this version captures the vertiginous apprehensions that lie within a seemingly quiet novel about the rewards of resignation.

Though the moral choices made by Austen’s characters are of undeniable importance, their lives are never entirely their own. The talk of their friends, relatives and even people they have never met propels would-be lovers into blunders, blindness, revelations and, with the divine dispensation at a novelist’s command, happy nuptials, if they’re lucky.

The real wonder of Bedlam’s accomplishment here isn’t so much the exciting animation it brings to a work regarded (wrongly) by some readers as too static to compel. It’s the transformation of gossip into a dynamic, palpable force that shapes both collective societies and individual destinies. As it turns out, that force has a lot in common with the narrative impulse of hotly told stories that make irresistible theater.

RECITAL

Marble Collegiate
Noontime Organ Recital Series

THEATER

The Helen Hayes Theater
The Humans

Review: ‘The Humans,’ a Family Thanksgiving for a Fearful Middle Class

A middle-class family seems to be spiraling toward perilous entropy in “The Humans,” the blisteringly funny, bruisingly sad and altogether wonderful play by Stephen Karam that opened on Sunday at the Laura Pels Theater, in a superlative Roundabout Theater Company production.

Written with a fresh-feeling blend of documentarylike naturalism and theatrical daring, and directed with consummate skill by Joe Mantello, Mr. Karam’s comedy-drama depicts the way we live now with a precision and compassion unmatched by any play I’ve seen in recent years. By “we” I mean us non-one-percenters, most of whom are peering around anxiously at the uncertain future and the unsteady world, even as we fight through each day trying to keep optimism afloat in our hearts.

The play turns on a staple of American drama: the family gathering. This can lead to canned laughter or trumped-up histrionics, but the Blakes, who assemble in Manhattan for Thanksgiving dinner, are drawn with such specificity and insight that we are instantly aware that we are in safe hands. (Mr. Karam’s “Sons of the Prophet,” seen on the same stage, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.)

These could be people we all know, a family with strong bonds, small subterranean resentments and the kind of troubles tearing at the fabric of the American middle class — which is to say money problems. But Mr. Karam’s play, like Annie Baker’s recent “John,” also contains shivery hints of the uncanny, reminders that the world is a mysterious place, not necessarily built for the comfort of the humans who seem to rule it.

Dinner is hosted by the youngest Blake sibling, Brigid (Sarah Steele), and her boyfriend, Rich (Arian Moayed), at their new apartment in Chinatown. It’s a duplex, but one made from combining a dark basement apartment with the almost equally dark unit upstairs. In David Zinn’s terrifically detailed two-tiered set, a spiral staircase connects the floors, and the action moves between them almost constantly.

The rest of the family has come from Pennsylvania: Brigid’s parents, Erik (Reed Birney) and Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell), along with Erik’s mother, called Momo (Lauren Klein), all from Scranton; and Brigid’s older sister, Aimee (Cassie Beck), from Philadelphia, where she works as a lawyer.

As the family members greet one another and housewarming gifts are given, the anatomy of the clan comes through as if in a clear X-ray: Erik and Deirdre toil at the kind of unspectacular jobs that have supplied a solid middle-class living (or the kind that used to, anyway). He’s worked for nearly 30 years at a private school, mostly in maintenance; she’s been an office manager at the same firm for even longer.

They take care of Momo, who is in a wheelchair and has dementia, but they cannot afford to hire someone to help, even as she becomes ever more subject to wild fits of temper. (Ms. Klein is remarkable as Momo, who sleeps through much of the dinner but occasionally begins muttering darkly, or flares up into one of her fits.)

As he engages in getting-to-know-you chat, Erik remarks, “I’ll tell you, Rich, save your money now … I thought I’d be settled by my age, you know, but man, it never ends … mortgage, car payments, Internet, our dishwasher just gave out.” He then adds, in a line as bleak as it is funny, “Don’tcha think it should cost less to be alive?”Brigid and Aimee seem to embody the classic American ideal of each generation doing better than the previous one, but they are weathering their own storms. Aimee reveals that she’s going to be laid off from her job, for ostensible work-related reasons but in fact, she believes, because she had to take time off because of her ulcerative colitis. (She is also sad about a recent breakup with her longtime girlfriend.)

Brigid aspires to be a composer, but is mired in student debt; she makes her living tending bar. Rich comes from a slightly higher class. He’s studying to become a social worker but will come into a trust fund when he turns 40 — two years away — a bit of information that Erik greets with a mild sense of resentment, just barely hinted at in Mr. Birney’s typically sensitive, nuanced performance.

All the actors in “The Humans” are at their best. Ms. Houdyshell’s bubbly humor and warmth are, as always, immensely pleasurable; like Mr. Birney, she’s incapable of a dishonest word or action. Ms. Beck and Ms. Steele have a nice sisterly rapport, as the women share laughs over their mother’s strange barrage of texts and emails. (“You don’t have to text her every time a lesbian kills herself,” Brigid says, referring to a recent dispatch from Mom to Aimee.) Mr. Moayed has one of the smaller roles, but he provides Rich with an amiable gravity and intimations of emotional troubles he once faced.

 Mr. Mantello orchestrates the complicated action and shifting emotional currents with admirable dexterity; this may be his finest work in an already distinguished career. For while “The Humans” is on the surface a realistically drawn play about a family facing various crises, Mr. Karam employs this familiar formula to look more deeply at the ways we are all at the mercy of fate and circumstance.

Erik had accompanied Aimee on a job interview in Lower Manhattan on 9/11; he still recalls the terrifying two hours it took for them to find each other amid the chaos. He’s not too comfortable with Brigid’s moving into a basement apartment in a potential flood zone, either. His grandmother died in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in 1911, just blocks away.

And Brigid sums up one of Deirdre’s emails to her daughters, with a link to a science article, thus: “Happy Tuesday, oh and just F.Y.I.: At the subatomic level, everything is chaotic and unstable … Love, Mom.”

The fragility of human life and all it contains is a recurring theme, and it accelerates as the drama darkens — literally. In addition to strange, loud thuds from somewhere above (it sounds like the footsteps of an angry or indifferent god), the apartment grows dimmer as one light after another mysteriously blinks out.

By the end of Mr. Karam’s haunting, beautifully realized play — quite possibly the finest we will see all season — the apartment has emptied; there’s not a single human being left on a stage suddenly plunged into total darkness, as if a black hole had swallowed up the Blake family before the turkey has even had time to cool.

PERFORMANCE

Merkin Hall
What Makes It Great? - From "On the Town" to "West Side Story" - Theater Songs of Leonard Bernstein

"Today it seems incomprehensible that Leonard Bernstein endured brutal criticism for throwing away his talent on Broadway musicals like On the Town and West Side Story. His attempts to bring a classical compositional technique into the world of the popular theater ruffled more than a few feathers, and though Bernstein expected other classical composers to follow his lead, his extraordinary blend of the serious and the popular remains unique in Broadway history.

Host Rob Kapilow explores Bernstein's attempts to reimagine the possibilities of musical theater in a program that will forever change the way you see Tony and Maria!"

THEATER

The Pearl Theater
Martin Luther on Trial

LUTHER, HITLER, FREUD, POPE FRANCIS, MARTIN LUTHER KING JR & THE DEVIL. . . ON STAGE TOGETHER?

“Here I stand, I can do no other.” – Martin Luther

A trial in the afterlife, and the prosecutor…is the Devil. In the new original play Martin Luther on Trial, Luther’s beloved wife Katarina defends him as witnesses including Adolf Hitler, Sigmund Freud, Rabbi Josel, St. Paul, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Pope Francis take the stand. Even as 2017 marks 500 years since Luther ignited the Protestant Revolt against Rome, he continues to spark intense debate. You be the judge in this witty, provocative exploration of one of history’s most explosive personalities and the religious and political controversies he unleashed.

A site for reference...

As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,
The soul from purgatory springs.

"Historians have described it as the trial that led to the birth of the modern world.  Before the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and the Diet of Worms in the spring of 1521, "the past and the future were met."  Martin Luther bravely defended his written attacks on orthodox Catholic beliefs and denied the power of Rome to determine what is right and wrong in matters of faith.  By holding steadfast to his interpretation of Scripture, Luther provided the impetus for the Reformation, a reform movement that would divide Europe into two regions, one Protestant and one Catholic, and that would set the scene for religious wars that would continue for more than a century, not ending until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648." 

LINCOLN CENTER

David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic

Charles Dutoit - Conductor
Yuma Wang - Piano

Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 9, Jeunehomme
Respighi - Roman Festivals
Respighi - Fountains of Rome
Respighi - Pines of Rome

The trailer for this concert...

The scintillating Yuja Wang, who “always stuns with her virtuosity and catch-me-if-you-can speeds” (The New York Times), shines in Mozart’s boldly spirited Piano Concerto No. 9, Jeunehomme. Next stop: a sumptuous tour of the Eternal City with Respighi as your guide in his evocative Pines of Rome, Fountains of Rome, and Roman Festivals.