World premieres and site-specific performances include new works by Theaster Gates and The Black Monks; composer and vocalist Arooj Aftab in The Temple of Dendur; a new Quartet in Residence, Catalyst Quartet; and dancer and choreographer Bijayini Satpathy
(New York, August 15, 2022)—The Met today announced its 2022–23 season of live performances, which will include commissioned and site-specific works that will take place in multiple galleries at both The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters, as well as in the Museum’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. MetLiveArts traditionally invites leading multidisciplinary performers to amplify the Museum’s collection through their own art and creative process. The new season of performances—which includes music, dance, and improvisational theatrical works—attempts to deepen the contemporary dialogue about significant human narratives and experiences throughout history. World premieres, original commissions, and site-specific events will reenvision classic compositions, inspire new and deeply relevant connections, and further embolden performers to explore programs that spark their curiosity.
“This season of MetLiveArts presents a powerful lineup of performances that will draw on complexities and nuances within The Met’s great collection,” said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met. “The incredible range of commissions and new works ahead further strengthens the Museum’s commitment to artists and the collaborative creative process.”
In September, to begin the season, the 2021–22 MetLiveArts Artist in Residence, choreographer and dancer Bijayini Satpathy, will conclude her year at the Museum with a new evening-length work, Dohā. Other season highlights include the world premiere in January 2023 of Songs in Flight with Rhiannon Giddens, poet Crystal Simone Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winner Tyehimba Jess, composer Shawn Okpebholo, and professor and poet Dr. Tsitsi Ella Jaji; and, in February 2023, a processional performance by Theaster Gates and The Black Monks in response to The Met’s exhibition Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina.
Throughout the 2022–23 season, the Quartet in Residence will be Catalyst Quartet, who will bring two distinct collaborations to the Museum—a theatrical deep dive into Bach’s monumental Goldberg Variations with the performance artist Machine Dazzle, and a program featuring Latinx composers with American Ballet Theatre Principal Dancer Herman Cornejo. Catalyst Quartet will also stage several in-gallery explorations of historically overlooked composers, such as Florence Price and Germaine Tailleferre.
Limor Tomer, Lulu C. and Anthony W. Wang General Manager of Live Arts, commented: "This season we invite a group of singular artists—all very different from one another—to see and feel the collection, source inspiration, discover what resonates with their practice, and then translate that experience into moving performances that connect the artists with audiences in new ways.”
Performances will be both ticketed and free with Museum admission and will take place in person at The Met as well as digitally on The Met’s website. The Museum’s popular “Date Night at The Met” evenings, held every Friday and Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m., will continue to feature live music by ETHEL & Friends and occasional pop-up performances throughout the galleries.
$30 tickets will be available for more than 20 percent of all seats, due to support from the Adrienne Arsht Fund for Resilience through Art.
Quartet in Residence: Catalyst Quartet
Founded in 2010 by the Sphinx Organization, the Grammy-winning Catalyst Quartet—Karla Donehew Perez (violin), Abi Fayette (violin), Paul Laraia (viola), and Karlos Rodriguez (cello)—has toured extensively both domestically and abroad, selling out top U.S. venues including Chicago’s Harris Theater, the Kennedy Center, and Carnegie Hall. The New York Times called them “beautiful to watch,” comparing them to “a family in lively conversation at the dinner table: anticipating, interrupting, changing subjects.”
For their residency at The Met, they collaborate with several prominent artists, including the surrealist performer and designer Machine Dazzle and the ballet star Herman Cornejo, to redefine, reimagine, and recontextualize the classical music experience. Catalyst Quartet will lead audiences on journeys that augment music with elements of visual and performance art.
Bassline Fabulous: J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations with Machine Dazzle
Friday, December 16, and Saturday, December 17, 2022, at 7 p.m.
Vanderlyn Panorama, The American Wing (Gallery 735)
Through 30 movements of mathematics and acrobatics, the bass line of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations remains a lasting piece of infrastructure undergirding one of Western music’s wildest, yet most logical, exercises in transformation. With Bassline Fabulous, Catalyst Quartet takes an immersive dive into the behemoth keyboard work, presenting their acclaimed Goldberg arrangement. Machine Dazzle responds to the Quartet’s performance in real time, interpreting the music’s inescapable evolution into a performance/installation through a personal, emotional lens.
Tickets start at $125 (plus $5 service charge).
Impacto: The Global Influence of Latinx Composers with Herman Cornejo
Wednesday, May 10, 2023, at 7 p.m.
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Latinx composers have helped shape traditions in their homelands as well as abroad, cementing national sounds and movements from the world’s preeminent concert stages. In this program, Catalyst Quartet will celebrate their expansive reach and impact featuring a new work choreographed and performed by American Ballet Theatre Principal Dancer Herman Cornejo.
Program:
Antonio Carlos Gomes: Sonata de Cordas
Teresa Carreño: String Quartet in B minor
Miguel Bernal Jiménez: Cuarteto Virreinal
Astor Piazzolla: Suite del Angel arr. Catalyst Quartet (with Herman Cornejo)
Tickets start at $30 (plus $5 service fee).
Lost and Found in the Galleries
Friday, November 25, and Saturday, November 26, 2022, and Friday, April 7, and Saturday, April 8, 2023, at 6, 7, and 8 p.m.
Various galleries throughout the Museum
Discover music and composers that history has largely pushed to the margins. The Catalyst Quartet presents works by lesser-acknowledged voices. The programs will feature works by Florence Price, Joseph Bologne (Chevalier de Saint-Georges), Germaine Tailleferre, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, William Grant Still, Ethel Smyth, George Walker, and others.
Free with Museum admission.
CQ Minute
Monthly starting January 2023
The Met’s Instagram Account (@metmuseum)
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, Catalyst Quartet has commissioned micro string quartets from 10 composers, ranging from Pulitzer winners to jazz legends to indie-pop stars. These quartets, created specifically for The Met’s Instagram, will feature works by Andy Akiho, Kishi Bashi, Billy Childs, Paquito D’Rivera, Jessie Montgomery, Angélica Negrón, Kevin Puts, Caroline Shaw, and Joan Tower.
Bijayini Satpathy: Dohā
Tuesday, September 13, 2022, at 7 p.m.
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
In Bijayini Satpathy’s fifth and final performance of her 2021–22 MetLiveArts residency, the incomparable choreographer and dancer builds on her prior explorations of movement and art with an evening-length performance for the stage of the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. The new work, entitled Dohā, navigates the relationship between prayer and play, moving away from the Odissi dance form’s customary theistic depictions to highlight the bhāva—emotional experience—of prayer as an embodied human act. Within the discipline of ritualized prayer, Satpathy embraces play and playfulness as an essential part of the individual’s search for the divine.
Tickets start at $30 (plus $5 service fee).
Arooj Aftab
Thursday, September 22, 2022, at 7 p.m.
The Temple of Dendur (Gallery 131)
Arooj Aftab is a Brooklyn-based Pakistani composer, vocalist, and producer. Her distinctive musical dialect draws on jazz, minimalism, and neo-Sufi sounds. For her site-specific performance at The Met’s majestic Temple of Dendur, she will draw on the Museum's world-renowned collection of Deccan and Mughal art, manuscripts, and objects.
Note: This performance is sold out.
Sight and Sound: The Orchestra Now Series
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Join conductor and music historian Leon Botstein as he delves into the parallels between orchestral music and the visual arts. Accompanied by on-screen works from The Met collection and special exhibitions, along with musical examples played by The Orchestra Now, Botstein engages in lively discussion that culminates in a full performance and audience Q&A.
Tickets start at $30 (plus $5 service fee) for individual concerts. Series tickets start at $75 (plus $10 service fee).
Vaughan Williams and Renaissance England with works from The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England
Sunday, December 4, 2022, at 2 p.m.
Vaughan Williams: Three Portraits from the England of Elizabeth (The Explorer, The Poet, and The Queen)
England was a thriving home for the arts under the volatile Tudor dynasty, where an international community of artists and merchants navigated the lofty demands of royal patrons, including England’s first two reigning queens. In 1955, British documentarian John Taylor examined Elizabethan England against a regal score by composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. These selections from that score, adapted by Muir Mathieson, focus on three major figures of the Tudor era: Sir Francis Drake, William Shakespeare, and the namesake herself, Queen Elizabeth I.
Haydn, Brahms, and the Manufactured Classical Ideal, with works from Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color
Sunday, February 19, 2023, at 2 p.m.
Haydn: Symphony No. 38
Brahms: Variations on a Theme of Haydn
When 18th-century scholars exhumed ancient Greek and Roman sculptures that had spent more than a millennium underground, they assumed that the pieces had been created without color. Based on their observations of those newfound objects, art scholars built an imaginary picture of the classical past; with it came a set, “classical” idea of musical structure and form, cemented by its originator, “Papa” Franz Josef Haydn. A century later, as late romanticism jettisoned fixed forms in favor of passionate expressionism, Johannes Brahms fought to retain classicism as the aesthetic standard—and though musical classicism eventually ran its course, Brahms’s Variations provide a unique look back to its origins.
Art and Music in the Danish Golden Age, with works from Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish Art
Sunday, April 16, 2023, at 2 p.m.
Niels Gade: Symphony No. 1, “On Sjøland's Fair Plains”
During the early and mid-19th century, Denmark emerged from its imperial traditions and became a modern constitutional democracy. In art, this ushered in a focus on the ideal Danish landscape and its northern light. In music, celebrated Danish composer Niels Gade was just beginning his career. His 1842 Symphony No. 1, “On Sjøland's Fair Plains,” which incorporates themes from several Danish folk songs, caught the attention of Felix Mendelssohn, sparking a close friendship and kinship between the two giants.
Trio Mediæval
Sunday, December 11, 2022, at 2 and 4 p.m.
The Fuentidueña Chapel at The Met Cloisters
The Grammy-nominated Trio Mediæval weaves strands of medieval sacred music, folk, jazz, and improvisation through six centuries of holiday tunes both traditional and obscure with a program that includes English medieval carols and traditional Scandinavian songs and hymns for Advent and Christmas.
Tickets start at $65 (plus $5 service fee).
Songs in Flight
World Premiere
Thursday, January 12, 2023, at 7 p.m.
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
Rhiannon Giddens, singer and multi-instrumentalist
Shawn Okpebholo, composer
Karen Slack, soprano
Reginald Mobley, countertenor
Will Liverman, baritone
Howard Watkins, piano
In 2019, Cornell University started “Freedom on the Move,” a database of “runaway ads” collected from early newspapers in the United States. These ads, placed by enslavers, preserve snapshots of more than 30,000 enslaved people who took their fate into their own hands, liberating themselves from a cruel, ugly cycle whose effects ripple to this day.
“Freedom on the Move” inspired composer Shawn Okpebholo and Duke University professor and poet Dr. Tsitsi Ella Jaji to bring these individual stories to life through song. Additional material curated and performed by Grammy- and MacArthur Award-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens, poet Crystal Simone Smith, and poet and Pulitzer Prize-winner Tyehimba Jess will contextualize and respond to the database’s primary source materials.
Tickets start at $30 (plus $5 service fee).
Conceived and commissioned by Sparks & Wiry Cries.
Theaster Gates x The Black Monks: Procession and Performance
Friday, February 3, and Saturday, February 4, 2023, at 7 p.m.
Procession through various galleries, ending in The Lehman Wing
Based in Chicago’s South Side, Theaster Gates is a globally acclaimed contemporary artist whose sculptures, installations, and performances draw on themes of urbanism, archival memory, and architecture. Gates focuses on the possibility of life within objects, and recovers art value, land value, and human value by utilizing Black space. Gates and The Black Monks will perform new compositions based on inscriptions from objects in The Met’s exhibition Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina.
Free with Museum admission.
Quartetto di Cremona
Wednesday, March 1, 2023, at 7 p.m.
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
The small northern-Italian city of Cremona remains the world’s epicenter of string-instrument craft, almost half a millennium after the first artisans opened their shops. Today, several rare Cremonese instruments are in The Met collection. Join the Quartetto di Cremona—modern Cremona’s foremost musical ensemble—as they perform on four of the Museum’s prized instruments. Hear two violins from the famed Cremona workshop of Antonio Stradivari; a viola by German-speaking Europe's first known luthier, Jacob Stainer; and a cello by French romanticist Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume.
Tickets start at $65 (plus $5 service fee).
Diaspora: Jewish Music of Longing and Celebration
Sunday, March 19, 2023, at 2 p.m.
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
The Grammy-winning baroque ensemble Apollo’s Fire, led by conductor-harpsichordist Jeannette Sorrell, has garnered praise for its "ingenious programme[s]” and “superlative music-making" (The Daily Telegraph). Returning to The Met for the first time in three years, they present a thrilling mélange of music—both familiar and recently discovered—from Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewish traditions, plus selections from Baroque Italy’s small but mighty community of Jewish composers.
Tickets start at $65 (plus $5 service fee).
Digital Premieres This Season:
All digital premieres are released on The Met’s YouTube and website. Release dates for each performance will be announced.
Faraj Abyad in the Damascus Room (World Premiere)
Heartbeat Opera: Fidelio
Bijayini Satpathy in the Galleries
Matthew Evan Taylor: Life Returns
Gavin Creel: Walk On Through
CQ Minute: Music by Andy Akiho, Kishi Bashi, Billy Childs, Paquito D’Rivera, Jessie Montgomery, Angélica Negrón, Kevin Puts, Caroline Shaw, and Joan Tower (World Premiere)
Program Credits:
Bijayini Satpathy: Dohā is made possible by the Arnhold Fund for Dance Innovation at The Met. Additional support is provided by the Jerome Robbins Foundation.
Arooj Aftab is made possible by the Adrienne Arsht Fund for Resilience through Art. Additional funding is provided by William H. Wright II and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
The Quartet in Residence programming is made possible by the Grace Jarcho Ross and Daniel G. Ross Concert Fund.
Songs in Flight is made possible by Douglas Dockery Thomas and the Adrienne Arsht Fund for Resilience through Art.
Theaster Gates and The Black Monks is made possible by the Clara Lloyd-Smith Weber Fund. Additional funding is provided by the Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation.
Diaspora: Jewish Music of Longing & Celebration is made possible by The David Berg Foundation.
Exhibition Credits:
The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England
The exhibition is made possible by Alice Cary Brown and W.L. Lyons Brown, Frank Richardson and Kimba Wood, Barbara A. Wolfe, the Diane Carol Brandt Fund, The Coby Foundation, Ltd., The Klesch Collection, Ann M. Spruill and Daniel H. Cantwell, and Sharon Wee and Tracy Fu.
This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
It is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cleveland Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina
The exhibition is made possible by Kathryn Ploss Salmanowitz, The Met’s Fund for Diverse Art Histories, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang, The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, and the Henry Luce Foundation.
It is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish Art
The exhibition is made possible by Gilbert and Ildiko Butler.
Additional support is provided by the The Schiff Foundation.
The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum, in collaboration with SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark.
Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color
The exhibition is made possible by the Aretê Foundation/Betsy and Ed Cohen.
Additional support is provided by Mary Jaharis and Cathrin M. Stickney and Mark P. Gorenberg.
The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, in collaboration with the Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection, Frankfurt am Main.
Press resources