23 Classical-Music Performances We Can’t Wait to Hear in 2024
There’s no lagging indicator of cultural health quite so lagging as the classical-music world, which makes decisions two and three years out. The programming for 2024 — as much of it as has been announced, anyway — reflects the caution and gathering optimism that followed two years of crisis, and the signals from the juggernaut presenters are mixed. The Met continues its safari through (relatively) recent opera, Carnegie Hall explores the musical upheavals of a century ago, and Lincoln Center’s presenting division demotes classical music to a niche. And along with the doughty swarm of small organizations that keep New York’s music scene varied and vibrant, the Perelman Center makes its entrance as an opera presenter, staging one of the season’s two Huang Ruo works.
January
BAM, January 11–13
Huang Ruo’s opera about the San Francisco immigration center that effectively functioned as a detention camp for new arrivals from China anchors this year’s Prototype Festival. This multimedia, multi-genre piece for voices and string quartet takes as its text the Chinese poems that detainees carved in the center’s walls.
Carnegie Hall, January 20 through May
Bookended by two calamities — World War I and the rise of Nazism — and shot through with political discord, the Weimar years were so artistically rich that it must have felt like another stylistic revolution came along each month. Carnegie Hall explores the cornucopia of innovation in music over several months, starting with the Cleveland Orchestra performing Mahler and Bartok.
The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture, January 11, 12, 18–20
Composer Mary Kouyoumdjian and librettist Royce Vavrek base a 90-minute chamber opera on the Atom Egoyan film, about a boy who weaves the real story of a terrorist attack into his own invented family history. Part of the Prototype Festival.
Carnegie Hall, January 28
Performing the solo part in any Rachmaninoff piano concerto is a big deal; two would be brutal. But play all four in one go, plus the concertolike Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and the concept of excess pales. Yuja Wang is one of the few pianists who would take on this musical pentathlon — to call it a marathon doesn’t quite capture the sense of all-out sprinting — and she does it with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra by her side.
The Movie Music of Terence Blanchard
Geffen Hall, January 28
The Metropolitan Opera has made Blanchard something of a fixture by staging two of his operas (Fire Shut Up in My Bones and Champion), and now Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic co-present an evening of excerpts from the many scores he composed for Spike Lee films.
February
92nd Street Y, February 2
Barnatan’s own virtuoso transcriptions of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances for orchestra anchors a program of music for getting the body moving, including Rameau’s Baroque dances, Ravel waltzes, and Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet.
Met Opera, opens February 26
Mariusz Treliński directs the Met’s first new production in decades of Verdi’s great fate opera, with the unmissable Lise Davidsen as Leonore.
Zankel Hall, February 29
The nimble orchestra, which skips around time periods and genres as if such categories were an abstraction, joins pipa player Wu Man and singers Magos Herrera and Christina Courtin for a wildly diverse program that flings itself from Ravel to Bob Dylan and Chico Buarque.
Geffen Hall, February 29 and March 1
A new oratorio by Aaron Zigman, best known as a film composer (Bridge to Terabithia), tells the story in music of Jewish refugees from Nazi-controlled Europe who found a (temporary) haven in Shanghai. Lu Yong conducts the New York Philharmonic, which co-commissioned the work along with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, in a semi-staged performance directed by Mary Birnbaum.
March
Geffen Hall, March 7–9
The orchestra, led by Elim Chan, continent-hops through a program that alights in the Chickasaw nation of Oklahoma (with a new work by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate), Central Europe (Martinu’s “Cello Concerto No. 1,” performed by Sol Gabetta) and the Russian take on Arabia (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade).
Debussy & Matisse: Creating New Colors
Met Museum, March 10
Leon Botstein leads the Orchestra Now in a series of concerts that flesh out the soundtrack for the Met’s major exhibition. In the spring, “Vertigo of Color,” about the Fauves, brings Debussy’s brilliant, painterly Images.
American in Weimar: On the Margins
Zankel Hall, March 12
As part of Carnegie Hall’s Weimar festival, the American Composers Orchestra looks at the two-way slosh of influences between Germany and the United States, with music by George Antheil, Duke Ellington, Kurt Weill, and the contemporary Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate.
Wilson Theater, Juilliard, March 25
Juilliard’s student singers perform music about the intersection of insanity and power — Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King, Saariaho’s From the Grammar of Dreams, and Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon — in a multimedia production designed by the school’s Center for Innovation in the Arts.
Corpus Christi Church, March 24
The early music movement has centered on Europe, partly because that’s where the written sources were. But musicologist Lucy Duran helps kora player Ballaké Sissoko and South African guitarist Derek Gripper retrace some of Mali’s griot traditions to precolonial times.
April
Heartbeat Opera Spring Festival
Baruch Performing Arts Center, April 2–14
The small opera company with large ambitions alternates performances of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, reading the romance for the composer’s suppressed gay passions, and Daniel Schlosberg’s new love-in-the-time-of-climate-apocalypse opera, The Extinctionist.
Zankel Hall, April 12–13
The acid, color, and crackle that characterized Weimar-era music permeates a program of storytelling music by Paul Hindemith, Erich Korngold, Arnold Schoenberg, and Kurt Weill. Conducted by H.K. Gruber.
Corpus Christi Church, April 14
Scales and instruments traveled the same trade routes as raw materials and spices, which makes music a record of migrations. Two early-music groups, Constantinople and Accademia del Piacere, join forces to follow the cultural and economic threads that ran between Spain and Persia in the 15th and 16th centuries. Kiya Tabassian plays the setar (Persian lute) and sings; Fahmi Alqhai plays the viola da gamba.
Met Opera, opens April 23
John Adams’s not-quite-opera — it’s really a nativity oratorio — makes it to the Met in a production directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, with soprano Julia Bullock and baritone Davóne Tines. It’s hard to believe, but the veteran conductor Marin Alsop makes her company debut.
May
Perelman Arts Center, May 12–19
The second opera by Huang Ruo on the New York circuit within a few months (the Met has commissioned one too) narrates the real-life tragedy of Danny Chen, a son of Chinatown and a U.S. Army private whose fellow soldiers in Afghanistan hazed him to the point of suicide.
Geffen Hall, May 23–28
Jaap Van Zweden conducts two masterpieces of mystical transcendence: Mozart’s Requiem and Sofia Gubaidulina’s Viola Concerto, which draws its richness from the instrument’s velvety, hooded midrange. Antoine Tamestit is the soloist.
June
Met Cloisters, June 12
Johannes Ockeghem was to the second half of the 15th century what Stravinsky was to the 20th: a prolific and changeable composer whose influence few successors could comfortably ignore. The Clarion Choir and Orchestra performs a sizable chunk of his lifetime output in a five-hour extravaganza that migrates from room to room to garden.