MetLiveArts Announces 2020 Winter/Spring Season Of Performances
By: A.A. Cristi Jan. 10, 2020
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's performance series, MetLiveArts, Announces the 2020 Winter/Spring Season.
Performances include the feminist opera The Mother of Us All presented as a new site-specific production; a celebration of the Guarneri Quartet; Grammy Award-winner Baaba Maal in an acoustic program; and the return of Artist in Residence Nikhil Chopra in a performance that travels from The Met Fifth Avenue to The Met Cloisters.
Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: The Mother of Us All
Saturday, Feb. 8; Tuesday, Feb. 11; Wednesday, Feb. 12; Friday Feb. 14 All performances at 7 p.m. Gallery 700, The Charles Engelhard Court
Music by Virgil Thomson Libretto by Gertrude Stein Daniela Candillari, conductor Louisa Proske, director Felicia Moore, soprano, as Susan B. Anthony Musicians from the New York Philharmonic Singers from The Juilliard School's Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts
The Mother of Us All, which imaginatively chronicles the story of Susan B. Anthony and the women's suffrage movement, comes to The Met in a vivid and gripping fully staged production led by some of today's most dynamic and pioneering young artists working in opera. This iconic American opera, performed in a reduced orchestration, is deeply relevant today: the fight for women's suffrage that it depicts is mirrored in current struggles for the civil rights of people disenfranchised on the basis of gender, race, and sexuality.
This unprecedented collaboration between The Met, the New York Philharmonic, and The Juilliard School will be one of the central creative
MetLiveArts 2020 Winter/Spring Season
gestures in this year's celebration of the centenary of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote.
Tickets start at $140.
This program is part of Project 19, a multiyear New York Philharmonic initiative in honor of the centennial of the 19th Amendment.
The performances are made possible by Adrienne Arsht.
Haydn's The Clock: The Intersection of Art and Technology
Sunday, Feb. 23, 2 p.m. The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now
Musicians in the second half of the 18th century were mesmerized by the rapid and dazzling advancements in science. While Mozart poked fun at this fascination in Così fan tutte, Haydn drew inspiration from the fabulous advances in horology in Vienna and London, and thus the delightful Clock symphony.
Tickets start at $30.
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe, on view at The Met Fifth Avenue through March 1, 2020.
Nona Hendryx and Disciples of Sun Ra in the Temple
Saturday, Feb. 29, 7 p.m. Gallery 131, The Temple of Dendur in The Sackler Wing
Nona Hendryx, artistic director Craig Harris, music director Francesca Harper, choreography Virgil Ortiz, costume and set design Carl Hancock Rux, invocations
Sun Ra was a visionary artist and composer who infused his ecstatic performances with costumes and mythology that both looked back to ancient Egypt and forward into science fiction. Vocalist, songwriter, and author Nona Hendryx has created a multisensory tribute to this iconoclastic musician, with orchestrations by composer, trombonist, and Sun Ra devotee Craig Harris, conceived specifically for The Temple of Dendur in The Sackler Wing.
MetLiveArts 2020 Winter/Spring Season
Tickets start at $85.
This program is in partnership with Harlem Stage's WaterWorks commissioned, yearlong, city-wide celebration of Sun Ra, The Cosmic Synthesis of Sun Ra and Afrofuturism.
Apollo's Fire: O Jerusalem! Crossroads of Three Faiths
Saturday, Mar. 7, 7 p.m. The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra Jeannette Sorrell, direction and harpsichord Amanda Powell, soprano Jeffrey Strauss, baritone Ronnie Malley, oud and accordion Daphna Mor, winds
Internationally renowned period-instrument band Apollo's Fire recreates the vibrant and prolific mashup of music and poetry found in 16th- and 17th-century Jerusalem with this acclaimed new program at The Met. In one unforgettable evening, tour the four quarters of Old Jerusalem, where Jews, Muslims, and Christians co-existed in relative harmony, and hear Sabbath prayers, Sephardic ballads, Arabic love songs, and selections from Monteverdi's iconic Vespers of 1610 that echo the rapturous singing of Jewish cantors and the Muslim call to prayer. The troupe of 26 dynamic performers, including musicians of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian backgrounds, joins in a celebration of shared values.
Tickets start at $65.
Ensemble Graindelavoix: Singing the Virgin
Sunday, Mar. 8, 1 and 3 p.m. The Fuentidueña Chapel, The Met Cloisters
The highly lauded Ensemble Graindelavoix, from Antwerp, Belgium, is less an early-music ensemble than an art collective comprised of singers and instrumentalists experimenting in performance and creation. In this program of transcendent music inspired by the Virgin and Child, they bring their pioneering approach to the Romanesque splendor of The Fuentidueña Chapel and its 12th-century fresco, The Virgin and Child in Majesty and the Adoration of the Magi.
Tickets start at $65.
MetLiveArts 2020 Winter/Spring Season
Stories from the Sahel: Baaba Maal
Monday, Mar. 9, 7 p.m. The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
To complement the exhibition Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara, Senegalese icon Baaba Maal comes to The Met for a rare and exquisite acoustic performance of music interwoven with stories about his childhood, his upbringing and family, and legends of the Sahel. With his soaring voice, his decades-long career reached new heights and audiences on the Academy Award-winning soundtrack for Black Panther.
Tickets start at $35.
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara on view at The Met Fifth Avenue January 30-May 10, 2020.
Another performance in conjunction with the Sahel exhibition, featuring Vieux Farka Touré, will take place on Friday, April 3.
Niyaz: The Fourth Light Project
Friday, Mar. 20, 7 p.m. The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
"An evolutionary force in contemporary Middle Eastern music."-HuffPost "An alluring combination of medieval Persian exoticism and beats that are state of the art."-Billboard
Niyaz brings the transformative, multimedia phenomenon The Fourth Light Project to The Met for a performance that blends incantatory singing, sacred dance, electro- acoustic music, and mesmerizing visuals projected through interactive body-mapping technologies. At the spiritual core of the project is Rabia al-Basri: a Muslim saint and the first female Sufi mystic from eighth-century, modern-day Iraq whose revolutionary teaching and doctrines of divine love and non-duality lie at the center of Sufi mysticism.
Tickets start at $35.
They Will Take My Island
Friday, Mar. 27, 7 p.m. The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Atom Egoyan, films and direction Mary Kouyoumdjian, composition
MetLiveArts 2020 Winter/Spring Season
Laurie Olinder, projection artist JACK Quartet Silvana Quartet
Unreleased scenes and highly personal short films by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter) are given original new scores by Armenian American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian in this MetLiveArts commission. Egoyan's highly personal films and excerpts on the life of abstract painter Arshile Gorky are infused with themes of family and immigration. Kouyoumdjian's string quartets Bombs of Beirut and Silent Cranes explore her family's history with the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide through survivor testimonies and documentaries.
Tickets start at $65.
Reopening The Met's British Galleries Spektral Quartet
Saturday, Mar. 28, 7 p.m. Gallery 515, dining room from Lansdowne House, Annie Laurie Aitken Galleries
"The quartet proved that they have everything: a supreme technical command that seems to come easily; a capacity to make complicated music clear; and, most notably on this occasion, an ability to cast a magic spell...."-The New York Times
In the newly reopened British Galleries, staged inside the magnificent 18th-century dining room of the Lansdowne House, Spektral Quartet will perform Beethoven's last major work-the String Quartet No. 16 in F major, op. 135, in an intimate and opulent setting similar to how the work would have been heard in 19th-century London. It is intellectually confounding and emotionally ravaging, probing new musical territory with sharp contrasts of light and dark. The Beethoven work is bookended by a string quartet rendering of Tomás Luis de Victoria's sublime 16th-century motet O Magnum Mysterium and Eliza Brown's Quartet No. 1 (2013).
Tickets start at $65.
The second performance in this series will take place on Saturday, April 18, at 6 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Bradley Strauchen-Scherer, Associate Curator in the Department of Musical Instruments, will provide context and an introduction to each program.
Presented as part of Carnegie Hall's Beethoven Celebration marking the 250th anniversary of his birth.
Stories from the Sahel: Vieux Farka Touré
MetLiveArts 2020 Winter/Spring Season
Friday, Apr. 3, 7 p.m. The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Mali's superstar singer, songwriter, and virtuoso guitarist Vieux Farka Touré performs the legendary epic stories presented throughout the exhibition Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara during an evening of deeply informed musical storytelling.
Tickets start at $35.
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara on view at The Met Fifth Avenue January 30-May 10, 2020.
Another performance in conjunction with the Sahel exhibition, featuring Baaba Maal, will take place on Monday, March 9, at 7 p.m.
British Brass: The Wallace Collection
Saturday, Apr. 18, 6 and 7:30 p.m. Gallery 515, dining room from Lansdowne House, Annie Laurie Aitken Galleries
Be transported back to the 18th century and hear the music of Beethoven and other English and French composers as it may have been experienced at the time in this performance by one of the world's leading brass ensembles, the Scotland-based Wallace Collection, within the newly renovated and reopened dining room from Lansdowne House. The program includes arrangements of Beethoven's Scottish songs and the Turkish march from his incidental music for The Ruins of Athens, along with other contemporaneous works.
Tickets start at $65.
The first performance in this series will take place on Saturday, March 28, at 7 p.m.
Bradley Strauchen- Scherer, Associate Curator in the Department of Musical Instruments, will provide context and an introduction to each program.
Presented as part of Carnegie Hall's Beethoven Celebration marking the 250th anniversary of his birth.
The Guarneri Quartet: A Celebration The Guarneri Quartet was in residence at The Met for nearly one-third of the Museum's 150-year history. The quartet, which disbanded in 2009, was known for the warmth and individuality of its sound and dramatic approach to the quartet literature, as well as its longevity-they played together for 45 years with only one change in personnel. The Guarneri helped spur the growth and popularity of the string quartet in the United States and influenced and mentored generations of young musicians. In this two-day tribute, The
MetLiveArts 2020 Winter/Spring Season
Met brings together members of the Guarneri Quartet for conversation, followed by an all- day string quartet marathon featuring today's top ensembles.
An Evening with the Guarneris
Friday, Apr. 24 at 7 p.m. The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Members of the Guarneri Quartet Performances by the Dover Quartet Hosted by Astrid Schween, cellist, Juilliard Quartet
The string quartet is perhaps the most defining and personal form of expression for composers, couching their deeply confessional utterances within the apparent simplicity of its instrumentation. Members of the Guarneri Quartet discuss their music making and legacy of coaxing these utterances to the surface, while the Dover Quartet performs music by Beethoven and a Guarneri-commissioned piece by American composer Derek Bermel. Students from the Special Music School (P.S. 859) coached by the Guarneri's Arnold Steinhardt offer insight into the next generation of quartet musicians.
The Legacy Made Visible: All-Day String Quartet Marathon Honoring the Guarneri Quartet
Saturday, Apr, 25, all day beginning at 12 p.m.
Hosted by Terrance McKnight (host, WQXR)
The Guarneri Quartet's influence is revealed in this unprecedented all-day marathon performance showcasing some of the most dynamic quartets of today and ascendant ensembles of tomorrow. The Borromeo, American, Shanghai, Maxwell, Orion, Zorá, Ying, and special surprise string quartets perform, as well as members of the illustrious Emerson String Quartet. The marathon promises renewed interpretations of time-honored music by Beethoven, Sibelius, Ravel, Dvorak, Haydn, and others. The marathon will end with a festive performance of Mendelssohn's Octet.
Tickets for each event start at $60. Tickets to both Friday evening and Saturday start at $100.
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Making The Met, 1870-2020, on view at The Met Fifth Avenue March 30-August 2, 2020.
MetLiveArts 2020 Winter/Spring Season
Amarcord
Sunday, Apr. 26, 1 and 3 p.m. The Fuentidueña Chapel at The Met Cloisters
Over its almost-30-year history, the vocal ensemble Amarcord-based in Leipzig, Germany-has developed an international reputation for its unique tone, breathtaking homogeneity, and musical authenticity. In their only New York City appearance this season, they bring their consummate artistry to the intimate Fuentidueña Chapel to perform music by Dufay, Ockeghem, and Josquin alongside other luminous works from the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Tickets start at $65.
John Holiday: Hold On! Freedom is Coming!
Friday, Jun. 12, 7 p.m. The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
The ascendant countertenor John Holiday, whose voice has been praised as "a thing of astonishing beauty" (The New Yorker), has created an evening of music inspired by the exhibition of Jacob Lawrence's narrative series Struggle...From the History of the American People. Holiday juxtaposes classical Italian opera with Civil Rights-era songs by African American composers, including Margaret Bonds and H. Leslie Adams, in a program that reconsiders the prevalent understanding of art song.
Tickets start at $50.
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, on view at The Met Fifth Avenue June 2-September 7, 2020.
2019-20 Artist in Residence: Nikhil Chopra Lands, Waters, and Skies: Part Two Saturday, Jun. 13, 11 a.m. Performance begins near The Met Fifth Avenue at 11 a.m. and travels by foot to The Met Cloisters (wear walking shoes).
Artist in Residence Nikhil Chopra concludes his yearlong residency at The Met with a festive, interactive, and inclusive performance that ends with a p
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