Salon/Sanctuary Concerts Presents 6th Season, Featuring MORE BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH, ROSSINI IN PARIS and More

Selected for inclusion in WQXR's Salute The ARts Initiative, a program that profiles 36 small cultural non-profit organizations in the New York Metropolitan area, we are honored to have earned a place on WQXR's roster. It is with joy and exhilaration that we share our upcoming roster and events with you.

With programming that journeys from Africa to America, from Italy to France, from Prayer to Dance, and from Ghetto to Capella, our renowned artists include Jory Vinikour, Hopkinson Smith, Jennifer Rivera, Melissa Errico and Kathleen Chalfant, with venues that punctuate the founding of our country and others that look forward to a new century. New subscription options offer more possibilities at substantial savings.

Beloved programs return and venture beyond New York, with one concert developed in Florence, Italy and another making a debut at the reveredAmerican Philosophical Society of Philadelphia.

Please join us for offerings hailed as "highly original," by the New York Times, "imaginative" by New York Magazine, and "impeccably curated" byTime Out New York.

We can't wait to see you.

Subscription option 1: SSC @ AAS

Prime seating for all four concerts at the Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium for a total savings of $40.

[Buy Tickets.]

Subscription option 2: Vive la France!

Prime seating for all four concerts of French-related programming for a total savings of $40.

[Buy Tickets.]

Jory Vinikour Performs Rameau

Thursday, October 9th at 7pm, The Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium
417 East 61st Street between First and York Avenues

In celebration of the Rameau year, Grammy®-nominated harpsichordist Jory Vinikour opens the season with an all-Rameau recital at the Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium.

A wine and cheese reception will follow the performance.

[Buy Tickets.]

From Ghetto to Capella

Tuesday, October 28th at 6pm, St. Paul's Chapel of Columbia University
1160 Amsterdam Avenue at 116th Street

The ghetto walls that separated Gentile from Jew in Counter-Reformation Italy were more porous than impenetrable, allowing for a rich musical dialogue and vibrant exchange of ideas throughout the baroque era. This concert explores the cross-fertilization of Jewish and Catholic musical cultures in the music of Claudio Monteverdi, Benedetto Marcello, Francesco Durante, Barbara Strozzi, Salomone Rossi, and 18th century unaccompanied Hebrew chants.

Jessica Gould, soprano & Noa Frenkel, contralto

Pedro d'Aquino, harpsichord and organ

This program is a co-presentation of Music at St. Paul's Chapel of Columbia University and was originally developed with the generous support of the Archdiocese of Florence, Italy.

Admission to this concert is free and open to the public.

We are grateful for your tax-deductible donation in support of this program. Thank you.

Donate

Hopkinson Smith Performs Bach

Tuesday, November 11th at 7pm, The Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium
417 East 61st Street between First and York

In his only New York appearance of the season, Hopkinson Smith performs his own transcriptions of JS, Bach, Suites 1-3, BWV 1007-1009 at the Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium.

A wine and cheese reception will follow the performance.

"Hopkinson Smith is without doubt the finest lute player in the world today"

- San Francisco Chronicle

[Buy Tickets.]

Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew

Saturday, December 13th at 8pm, The Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium
417 East 61st Street between First and York

Painting of Denis Diderot by Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Hilarity ensues at a Paris cafe when Diderot pits a hapless buffoon against a stoic philosopher in his stinging satire about the music business and high society of Enlightenment France.

Step into elegant Café Society at the dusk of the Ancien Regime, as icons tumble, gossips rumble, and musicians hurl their slings. Arrows fly between the fans of French harmony and Italian melody in this site-specific music-theater piece based on the Philosophe's play of opposites.

Pull up a chair and enjoy a glass of wine, as the game of buffoons andQuerelle des Bouffons unfold to the seductive airs of Lully, Pergolesi, Vivaldi, and the great Rameau, whose anniversary year we salute and draw to a close with this production of Diderot's witty masterpiece.

All tickets include cafe seating and complimentary vin and pain.

Starring Steven Rattazzi, praised by the New York Times as "an actor of impressive subtlety" and for "the cracked comic charm of Peter Sellers"

[Buy Tickets.]

Sunday, January 18th at 4pm
The Bissel Room of Fraunces Tavern, 54 Pearl Street

Erica Gould, Script and Stage Direction
Jessica Gould, Program Concept and Music Research

Melissa Errico and Kathleen Chalfant star in Salon/Sanctuary's original production, which travels to two historic institutions this season, Fraunces Tavern in New York City, constructed in 1719, where Jefferson served as the first Secretary of State when Washington's cabinet was upstairs, and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, the year of Jefferson's birth.

Igniting in Revolutionary Paris and unfolding over a 40-year epistolary relationship, the Jefferson/Cosway correspondence brims with exquisite music and eloquent prose, as the romance between two polymaths, the Statesman-Architect and the Musician-Painter, renders a vivid picture of musical life in 18th century France and America.

The Jefferson/Cosway letters reveal his evolving views on the Separation of Church and State intermingled with her account of a stifling marriage and the limited options open to a woman of brilliance. With an original script composed entirely of selections from their writings, this play with music features repertoire that they heard, composed, played, and sent to each other, including works of Corelli, Hewitt, Sacchini, and Cosway herself.

Tickets are on sale at Fraunces Tavern in New York City. Tickets are available for a post-performance dinner with the cast in the Bissel Room.

[Buy Tickets.]

Jennifer Rivera, mezzo-soprano
Kenneth Merrill, fortepiano

Rossini in Paris

Saturday, January 24th at 8:00pm, The Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium

The fireworks continue long past New Year's with Opera Buffa's greatest genius, Gioachino Rossini.

Having conquered the operatic world with glimmering masterworks of comedic invention, Rossini retired to the City of Lights, where he enjoyed the lavish lifestyle of a guiltless gourmand.

As his waistline expanded, he tossed fulsome opera for slender song, and left the world a feast of intimate treasures fit for decadent salonistes.

A banquet shared by two masters of the bel canto repertoire, come hear why Stendhal called Rossini "the musical embodiment of Paris."

A wine and cheese reception will follow this performance.

[Buy Tickets.]

Prayers and Dances: Music for the German Harpsichord

Sunday, March 22nd at 4:00pm, The Church of the Epiphany
1393 York Avenue at 74th Street

Harpsichordist Giuseppe Schinaia performs sacred and secular works of Christian Ritter, Johann Pachelbel, Georg Böhm, Johann Kuhnau, and JS Bach.

[Buy Tickets.]

Early Music of Western Africa

Saturday, April 11th 8pm
Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Peter Norton Symphony Space
2537 Broadway at 95th Street

Ensemble Umoja Lisanga joins acclaimed Liberian soprano Dawn Padmoreand scholar & drummer Anicet Munundu for a performance of traditional Western African music from the areas that we now know of as Ghana, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone.

Hear the songs of Akin Euba, Joshua Uzoigwe, Princess Hawa Daisy Moore, Kwabena Nketia, as well as chants and dances of Western Africa, pre-dating by centuries any music that we currently refer to as "early."

Join us for a unique concert that celebrates the music from a time of distant freedom, that survived a harrowing trip across an ocean, and lives on in the rhythms of American popular music today.

Tickets for this event will be available shortly.

Exodus: Dreams of the Promised Land in Antebellum America

Saturday, April 18th at 4pm

The Fraunces Tavern Museum Flag Gallery, 54 Pearl Street

The Western Wind Vocal Ensemble
with guest actors

Erica Gould, Script and Stage Direction
Jessica Gould, Program Concept and Dramaturg

Please join us for a moving and joyous celebration of the struggle for freedom and triumph over adversity through theatre and music.

The enduring power of liberation imagery in the early American consciousness comes to life through works by William Billings (1746 - 1800), Stephen Jenks (1772 - 1856), early spirituals and Shaker hymns performed with historical texts selected from abolitionist writings and slave and suffragette narratives, including selections from Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave.

Fraunces Tavern, the first site of the American government, sets the stage for starkly beautiful American repertoire.

Tickets for this event will be available shortly.

Be a part of the season. We welcome your support.

Donate

To post a comment, you must register and login.