LINCOLN CENTER

David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic

Handel - The Messiah

"The Messiah of all Messiahs! The New York Philharmonic’s Messiah is the must-see, must-hear holiday event. Every bar of Handel’s greatest masterpiece — whether upon first encounter or at a yearly ritual — speaks to us with passion, beauty, spirituality, and joy. Dazzling solos, instrumental fireworks, and the most glorious choral writing of all time never fail to thrill."

"Messiah represents the quintessential classical music highpoint of the Christmas season. Handel’s inspired setting of Biblical texts is a three-part meditation on the prophecy and fulfillment of God’s plan to redeem the world through a savior. Part I is filled with the joy of anticipation of that savior (epitomized in the jubilant chorus “Unto Us a Child is Born”). Part II reflects the sorrow and agony surrounding Christ’s passion and death, and the exultation of the resurrection, captured in the stirring “Hallelujah” chorus. Part III is a hymn of thanksgiving for the final defeat of death and for life eternal. Among the many other highlights of the oratorio are the noble concluding chorus, “Worthy is the Lamb” and the final “Amen.” Messiah’s dazzling solos, firework-filled instrumental passages, and some of the most glorious choral writing of all time have made it the undisputed holiday favorite of concert halls and churches throughout the world."

Add caption

MUSEUM

The Morgan Library and Museum

At the end of the 1520s, at the time of the siege that brought to an end the last Florentine Republic (1529–1530), the painter Jacopo da Pontormo, (1494–1557) created one of his most moving and groundbreaking paintings, the altarpiece of the Visitation. The recent restoration of this masterpiece of Mannerist art has created the extraordinary opportunity for the work to travel for the first time from Carmignano (near Florence in Italy) to the United States. Pontormo: Miraculous Encounters presents Pontormo’s spectacular altarpiece together with its preparatory drawing and with another masterpiece by the artist, the Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap (Carlo Neroni?). Pontormo painted this portrait of the handsome yet enigmatic young man during the same dramatic months of the siege of Florence. Believed to be lost, it has only been recently rediscovered in a private collection in Europe.

This exhibition is made possible with lead funding from an anonymous donor in memory of Melvin R. Seiden and generous support from Mr. and Mrs. J. Tomilson Hill and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence R. Ricciardi.

The Library.

LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Baroque Collections

"As the holidays approach, many give thanks for their blessings, and for music lovers, there’s nothing to be more grateful for than the entire Baroque era, lasting roughly 150 years until the death of Bach in 1750. The art of chamber music was born during that time, performed on newly-improved instruments by the greatest composer-virtuosi of the day."

Quantz - Concerto No. 161 in G major for Flute, Strings, and Continuo, QV 5:174 (c. 1745)
Handel - “Eternal Source of Light Divine” from Ode for the Birthday of Queen Annefor Soprano, Trumpet, Strings, and Continuo (1713)
Bach - Aria No. 1 “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen” from Cantata Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen for Soprano, Trumpet, Strings, and Continuo, BWV 51 (1730)
Handel - “Per te lasciai la luce” and “Un pensiero voli in ciel” from Il delirio amorosofor Soprano, Flute, Strings, and Continuo, HWV 99 (1707)
Vivaldi - Concerto in A minor for Bassoon, Strings, and Continuo, RV 497 (after 1720)
Handel - Armida abbandonata for Soprano, Two Violins, and Continuo, HWV 105 (1707)
Handel - “Let the Bright Seraphim” from Samson for Soprano, Trumpet, Strings, and Continuo, HWV 57 (1741-42)
Vivaldi - Concerto in D major for Violin, Strings, and Continuo, RV 208, “Grosso Mogul” (c. 1710)

"Our annual Baroque Collection program allows us to sample the enormous variety of music composed during that very fertile period of music history. It was a time when forces of change were at work, opening doors for previously unimagined instrumental capabilities, sound colors, and styles of concert experience.

Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi provides a good example of the diversity of musical activity taking place between roughly 1650 and 1750. Vivaldi's output includes sacred music (he was an ordained priest), over 40 operas, and more than 500 concertos. In addition, he produced a wealth of sonatas for solo instrument plus continuo, trio sonatas, duos, and just about every other combination of instruments that form the basis of the chamber music literature (save the string quartet and modern piano trio). The output of Johann Sebastian Bach is similar if not quite as voluminous, with his more than two hundred cantatas and multiple oratorios substituting for opera, making up in unmatched quality what he lacked in quantity.

Bach and Vivaldi moved fluidly during their careers between the church and secular musical environments. Vivaldi busied himself presenting concerts by the young girls of his orphanage; Bach had his Collegium, which performed in Zimmermann's coffee house in Leipzig. These famous composers and their countless contemporaries availed themselves of the growing number of opportunities during the Baroque to bring music to people in all manner of venues, a trend which continues today.

Today's program brings to the stage a variety of instruments which were fully utilized by Baroque composers. The flute, bassoon, trumpet, and harpsichord all strained at the bit as the violin soared to perfection in the hands of Antonio Stradivari around 1715, and by the end of the 18th century would begin to sprout the keys and valves that guaranteed them technical accuracy. In perspective, the demands on all instruments made by Baroque composers necessitated the instrumental improvements that today afford their works to unprecedented life and resplendent beauty."

THEATER

Classic Stage Company
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

“With a cast of wily, willing storytellers headed by a blistering good Raúl Esparza, John Doyle’s Arturo Ui is a sly, fearsome sideshow, a deceptively humble, hugely exciting piece of work…It’s Richard III meets Jimmy Cagney by way of the vaudeville circuit, and in the hands of Doyle and his actors, it’s both rollicking and frightening.” 
– Sara Holdren, New York Magazine / Vulture

“The eight ensemble members here are delightfully resourceful. You could even imagine this version of Arturo Ui winning the flinty heart of its author for its imaginative interpretation of the Brechtian dictates of style and sensibility.”
– Ben Brantley, The New York Times

★★★★ “You laugh at him, you fear him, you realize you know him. You certainly can’t resist him”
– Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

In 1930s Chicago, mobster Arturo Ui will stop at nothing to control the cauliflower trade. Terror and bloodshed follow. Can anyone stop him? Brecht’s skewering of Adolf Hitler and totalitarianism is given renewed significance in a production directed by John Doyle. Written in 1941, the play was one of the Berliner Ensemble’s greatest box office successes.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-resistible-rise-of-arturo-ui-review-a-man-of-fuhrer-words-1543527578?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ Review: A Man of Führer Words

John Doyle’s revival of Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 satire about a Hitler-like Depression-era Chicago gangster largely avoids nudge-nudge references to the present moment.

Terry TeachoutNov. 29, 2018 4:39 p.m. ET

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St. 

As fine an artist as Mr. Doyle is, and as excited as I was by the prospect of seeing Raúl Esparza in the title role, I was more than a little bit apprehensive about this production going in. “Arturo Ui,” after all, isn’t one of Brecht’s masterpieces—its satire is too cartoonish—and I’ve seen a fair number of shows in recent months whose claims to artistic seriousness were undercut by the willingness of their makers to stoop to over-obvious anti-Trump pandering. But Mr. Doyle mostly avoids blatant point-making, instead giving us an electrifyingly coarse and colloquial show into which Mr. Esparza’s complex performance fits with surprising neatness.

When Brecht’s own Berliner Ensemble came to London in 1959 to perform “Arturo Ui,” Kenneth Tynan described the play as “a jagged, raucous parody of Hitler’s rise to power” performed in a manner “somewhere between Erich von Stroheim and the Keystone Cops.” Mr. Doyle, who designed Classic Stage’s production in addition to directing it, is aiming for the same effect, keeping in mind at all times the couplet spoken at play’s end and rendered as follows by George Tabori, whose pungent translation is used in this revival: “If we could learn to look instead of gawking, / We’d see the horror in the heart of farce.” Not only is the action of the play, which unfolds in a fluorescent-lighted warehouse, grotesquely comic in tone, but Mr. Esparza turns Ui-Hitler into a figure of fun (his whiny, nasal voice reminded me of Jerry Lewis).

At the same time, though, he also plays the dictator as a man given to startling outbursts of self-pity and doubt, a quality remarked on by many people who knew Hitler personally, Albert Speer among them. Only at the end of the play, when Ui (whose name is here pronounced to rhyme with “phooey”) has finally attained power, does his personality come fully into focus and we see him for what he is, a monster capable of doing anything necessary to get what he wants, up to and including ordering the killing of his closest friend.

Raúl Esparza Photo: Joan Marcus

Mr. Doyle’s staging, which attends to the Brechtian book of rules—everything is played straight out to the audience with glaring clarity—without being rigid about it, is full of touches for which the right word, unlikely as it sounds, is “elegant.” I loved the moment when he turns a folding table into a coffin by simply covering it with a white sheet and a handful of rose petals. Then Mr. Esparza pulls the sheet off the table, covers himself with it and sinks to the floor, beset by a Shakespearean nightmare vision of Ernesto Roma, the friend he has murdered (outstandingly well played by Eddie Cooper). A moment later, he flings the same sheet over his shoulder, turning it into a toga, and delivers the climactic oration in which he proclaims his plan for the future: “New York! New York today! The world tomorrow!”

It is in this speech that Mr. Doyle draws for the first and only time a crudely explicit parallel with the contemporary object of his satire, making the crowd listening to Ui yell “Lock her up! Lock her up!” It’s as if a reformed shoplifter, having successfully strolled all the way through a store without pinching anything, slipped a pack of gum into his pocket at the cash register before walking out the door. Otherwise, though, his “Arturo Ui” is free from such lapses of taste, though I didn’t care for the interpolated radio bulletins in which an announcer spells out the factual basis for each scene (“Reichstag Fire Trial Ends in Uproar!”). Perhaps Mr. Doyle fears that his audience knows nothing of Hitler’s rise to power—and he may, of course, be right. Otherwise, this production not only serves “Arturo Ui” with full faithfulness (save for the absence of incidental music, a surprising and unfortunate omission) but is the ideal vehicle for Mr. Esparza’s sensational performance. Brecht was a hard man to please, but my guess is that he would have liked it very much.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, is the author, most recently, of “Billy and Me.” Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.