Jonathan Pryce-Led MERCHANT OF VENICE, Christopher Wheeldon's THE WINTER'S TALE & More Set for Lincoln Center Festival 2016

Nigel Redden, Director of Lincoln Center Festival, today announced the line-up for the Festival, which runs from July 13-31, 2016. Artists and ensembles from seven countries, many of them making their Lincoln Center Festival debuts, will gather for the festival, now celebrating its 20th anniversary, and which continues its mission of presenting the finest classical and contemporary arts from around the world. An array of 49 dance, music, and theater performances will animate seven venues on and off the Lincoln Center campus.

Said Mr. Redden, "From the elegance of Noh, to the dancing in the aisles music of Goran Bregovi?, from a Shylock who redefines the role, to one of the most memorable Kunju singers of China, Lincoln Center Festival 2016 promises to be a wonderful exploration of fascinating works from around the world."

Lincoln Center Festival opens on July 13 with two elegantly ritualized productions with origins in Japan and China. One of Japan's oldest and most venerated Noh theater companies, Kanze Noh Theatre led by Kiyokazu Kanze, the 26th Grand Master of the Kanze School and a blood descendent of the founders of Noh, makes a rare New York appearance at theFestival. Japan's approximately 700-year-old classical theater art of extreme refinement is known for its resplendent costumes and masks, hypnotic music, and intricately stylized performance on an austere set featuring a single pine tree. In a Noh play the divide between the natural and supernatural is bridged as spirits and humans interact in a world rife with symbolism. On an official Noh stage that is being specially built by Lincoln Center Festival at the Rose Theater, Kanze Noh Theatre will give six performances, each one unique and including the traditional comic interlude known as kyogen, with some of the plays repeating throughout the run.

Sharing opening night on July 13 is the one-act opera, Paradise Interrupted, created by Chinese American composer Huang Ruo and visual artist Jennifer Wen Ma, known to global audiences for her work on the opening and closing ceremonies at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The piece, a Lincoln Center Festival co-commission, fuses and reimagines the biblical story of Eve's search for utopia after being expelled from the Garden of Eden with an episode from the Kun opera, The Peony Pavilion, which dates from 1598. Acclaimed Kun opera soprano Qian Yi, who so memorably made her New York debut in the marathon production of The Peony Pavilion at Lincoln Center Festival 99, stars. Joining her onstage is a vocal quartet consisting of tenor (Yi Li), countertenor (John Holiday), baritone (Joo Won Kang), and bass baritone (Ao Li), who sing in a tonally based Western idiom. Wen-Pin Chien leads a chamber orchestra mixing Western and Chinese instruments in a score written by Chinese American composer Huang Ruo that is a continuation of Kun opera tradition and yet, entirely new. There will be three performances in the Gerald W. Lynch Theater.

Tony and Olivier Award?winning actor Jonathan Pryce, the slyly sinister High Sparrow of Game of Thrones, returns to the New York stage after an absence of ten years as Shylock in the Globe Theater of London's acclaimed production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, directed by Jonathan Munby. Joining the star onstage in the esteemed Globe troupe is Phoebe Pryce, Jonathan's daughter, in the role of Jessica, the anguished moneylender's daughter. The Merchant of Venice will run for seven performances only at the Rose Theater, on a set that recreates the Globe stage.

Another play by Shakespeare brings the National Ballet of Canada to the festival with renowned British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon's version of The Winter's Tale. The production is ravishingly designed by Bob Crowley with music by Joby Talbot, who collaborated with the choreographer on his previous Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with lighting design by Natasha Katz, projection design by Daniel Brodie, and with stunning silk effects from recent MacArthur Grant winner, artist Basil Twist. In this ambitious work by the Tony Award?winning choreographer, elements of fairy-tale, comedy, tragedy, and fantasy are woven together into a complex and deeply touching meditation on loss, redemption, love, jealousy, and the nature of family. There will be five performances at the David H. Koch Theater.

Takarazuka, Japan's celebrated all-female musical revue troupe based in and named after the Japanese city of the same name, celebrates the centennial of its founding with its first appearance in New York in over 25 years with TakarazukaCHICAGO, running concurrently with the Tony Award?winning show, with a legendary book by Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse, music by John Kander, and lyrics by Fred Ebb, and now the number one longest-running American musical in Broadway history. Leading the cast are several of Takarazuka's former top stars: Saori Mine, Saki Asaji, Asato Shizuki, Yoka Wao,Wataru Kozuki, Hikaru Asami, Natsuki Mizu, and Yuga Yamato. As in all of its productions, Takarazuka's CHICAGO will be cast with women in every role, and as a coda to the evening's entertainment, an over-the-top revue-replete with glittering costumes and dance-will be performed by the entire company, as is the tradition with all its shows, which attracts an audience of 2.5 million annually. Takarazuka CHICAGO will play at the Koch Theater for six performances only.

Multi-award winning London-based performance company 1927, which specializes in combining performance and live music with animation and film to create magical filmic performance, makes its Lincoln Center Festival debut with Golem, a dark and fantastical production that explores the ways in which our digital world has created a monster, inspired by the shadowy figure from Jewish folklore as well as the early 20th-century literary work by Gustav Meyrink. There will be eight performances at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater.

The iconic and pioneering American composer Steve Reich, who was the focus of a multi-genre performance series atLincoln Center Festival 1999, returns for this summer's festival, with Reich/Reverberations, three concerts highlighting classic chamber music works from across his career. Some of New York's leading contemporary music ensembles-S? Percussion, JACK Quartet, and Ensemble Signal conducted by Brad Lubman-will perform a selection of Reich's most famous chamber works including Drumming, Different Trains (Grammy Award 1989), the Pulitzer Prize?winning Double Sextet, and Music for 18 Musicians (Grammy Award 1998), widely considered a masterpiece of American minimalism and "a landmark of 20th-century music" (The Guardian).

Charismatic Balkan superstar Goran Bregovi? and his raucous Wedding and Funeral Orchestra return for their thirdLincoln Center Festival visit - two boisterous concerts in which he will serve as catalyst and ringmaster in a musical spectacle unlike any other. For two nights David Geffen Hall will reverberate with the ecstatic energy of an Eastern European wedding, accented with soulful invocations and new world rhythms.

Paris's renowned Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, last seen at the festival in 2011 with its acclaimed A Magic Flute staged by Peter Brook, returns with its critically-acclaimed production of Molière's masterpiece, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, set to music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, which gently satirizes the pretensions of a social climber whose affectations are absurd to everyone but himself. The director is award-winning director Denis Podalydès. The exquisite costumes are by Christian Lacroix. There will be five performances at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater.

Over three nights in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, S? Percussion, comprised of percussionists Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting, with their "exhilarating blend of precision and anarchy, rigor and bedlam" (The New Yorker), will guide listeners through the thrilling and sensuous sound world they've created with works by composers John Cage, Bryce Dessner, Cenk Ergun, David Lang, Paul Lansky, Steven Mackey, Steve Reich, Dan Trueman, and Iannis Xenakis.

Lincoln Center Festival 2016 will present the first duo U.S. appearance of musicians Wang Li (kouxiang, or jew's harp) andWu Wei (sheng)-two Chinese artists who marry ancient and modern musical traditions in surprising and novel ways-in the intimate Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse for one night only.

Tickets: Lincoln Center Festival packages go on sale on January 21 to Friends of Lincoln Center and to the general public on January 28. Single tickets for the entire festival go on sale to Friends of Lincoln Center on March 28 and the general public starting April 11. For more information and to buy tickets, visit LincolnCenterFestival.org or go to the David Geffen Hall or Alice Tully Hall Box Offices, or call CenterCharge, 212.721.6500.

Programs, artists, and ticket prices are subject to change.

Lincoln Center Festival lead support is provided by American Express

Lincoln Center Festival 2016 is also made possible by The Shubert Foundation, Nancy A. Marks, LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust, The Harold & Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, The Katzenberger Foundation, Inc., Jennie and Richard DeScherer, J.C.C. Fund of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry of New York, Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater, Sharp Fund PLD at The New York Community Trust, Great Performers Circle, Chairman's Council, and Friends of Lincoln Center.

Public support for Lincoln Center Festival 2016 is provided the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, and National Endowment for the Arts.

Endowment support is provided by Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Nancy Abeles Marks.

MetLife is the National Sponsor of Lincoln Center

"Summer at Lincoln Center" is supported by Diet Pepsi

Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan