SEPTEMBER
Classical Music:
Norma
Metropolitan Opera, starts Sept. 30.
Operaphiles know Norma as the pinnacle of bel canto roles, one that few sopranos can handle. Sondra Radvanovsky may be the one to finally do justice to the aria “Casta diva.”
Dance:
Fall for Dance Festival
Delacorte Theater, Sept. 16 and 17.
The extravaganza goes one better for its tenth year, bringing Paul Taylor Dance Company, New York City Ballet, Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, and STREB Extreme Action Company to Central Park. Just like Jacob’s Pillow, but not three hours away!
The Metamorphosis
Joyce Theater, Sept. 17.
An intriguing adaptation of Kafka’s parable by Arthur Pita, making its U.S. debut: Royal Ballet principal Edward Watson takes on the buggy central role.
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater, starting Sept. 17.
The season opens with a new work from imaginative young Justin Peck and a collaboration between Benjamin Millepied and Nico Muhly, who paired on the ultraromantic “Two Hearts” last year.
OCTOBER
Classical Music:
American Symphony Orchestra
Carnegie Hall, Oct. 3.
Leon Botstein treats every concert like a rigorous lesson, and this one is a tour through New York modernism circa the watershed 1913 Armory Show, from Antheil’s A Jazz Symphony to Varèse’s Amériques.
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Carnegie Hall, Oct. 9.
The conductorless ensemble tries out a variation on the Three B’s: Beethoven’s Eroica and Brahms’s Liebeslieder Walzer are paired with the U.S. premiere of improv master Brad Mehldau’s “Variations on a Melancholy Theme,” a jazz-piano exploration of the two forefathers’ styles.
Alarm Will Sound
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oct. 11 and Nov. 16.
The dynamic new-music group starts its artist-in-residence tenure at the museum with an intriguing mix of Ligeti, Wagner, and Schoenberg, and continues with an all-Reich program.
The Silk Road Ensemble
Carnegie Hall, Oct. 16.
Yo-Yo Ma’s delightfully boundary-indifferent international supergroup plays a fifteenth-anniversary show.
Le Poème Harmonique
Miller Theatre, Oct. 19.
The French early-music ensemble builds an evening around Monteverdi’s war madrigal “Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda,” capping it off with a celebration of the spoken-and-sung opera style known as stile rappresentativo.
Le Concert d’Astrée
White Light Festival, Oct. 26.
Emmanuelle Haïm’s Baroque group, rarely seen here, performs “Aci, Galatea e Poliferno,” an early Handel cantata based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Dance:
San Francisco Ballet
David H. Koch Theater, Oct. 16.
Helgi Tomasson’s company flies in with work by Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky, and Mark Morris. Catch any performance with the otherworldly ballerina Yuan Yuan Tan.
Dance Heginbotham
BAM, Oct. 29.
The magnetic former Mark Morris dancer John Heginbotham has absorbed Morris’s taste for naturalistic movement with technical rigor. His company debuts at BAM with Dark Theater, inspired by Francis Picabia’s 1924 ballet Relâche.
American Ballet Theatre
David H. Koch Theater, Oct. 30.
Alexei Ratmansky’s joyful residency at ABT continues with The Tempest, a one-act ballet set to Sibelius’s scoring for the Shakespeare play. Revivals of Mark Morris’s Gong and Twyla Tharp’s Bach Partita sound pretty great, too.
NOVEMBER
Classical Music:
Minnesota Orchestra
Carnegie Hall, Nov. 2 and 3.
A Finnish weekend: Joining one of the great American philharmonics, Hilary Hahn teases out the power of the Sibelius Violin Concerto; the next night, Anne Sofie von Otter sings “Pohjola’s Daughter.” Osmo Vänskä conducts.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Contact!, Nov. 4.
After leading his violin concerto at the New York Philharmonic, Salonen will move downtown to the new venue SubCulture to conduct a wide selection of his chamber works for solo cello, wind quintet, and more.
New York Festival of Song
Merkin Concert Hall, Nov. 5.
To mark Ned Rorem’s 90th birthday, his pristinely constructed art songs will be paired with works by friends and inspirations like Copland, Britten, Bernstein, and Barber.
The Day Before
Symphony Space, Nov. 8.
This multimedia performance—with music from contemporary composers Doug Cuomo, Nico Muhly, Phil Kline, and Lera Auerbach—tries to imagine November 21, 1963, the day before JFK’s assassination.
Jack Quartet
White Light Festival, Nov. 19.
Relish the chance to soak up Georg Friedrich Haas’s In the Dark, performed by the enterprising string quartet in a totally blacked-out room.
21c Liederabend, op. 3
BAM, Nov. 22 and 23.
Composer Paola Prestini and creative director Beth Morrison team up for the third year of this festival that turns the art-song recital inside out. Composers paired with video artists and lighting designers include Missy Mazzoli, Olga Neuwirth, Mohammed Fairouz, and other bright lights of the new-music scene.