The PianoForte Recital Series Continues with Frederic Chiu's "Monument to Beethoven,"
Pacifica Quartet Continues Its Shostakovich Cycle,
Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert Plays Purcell, Berio, Kancheli & Beethoven,
Cirène, an Ensemble of Young New York Stars, Performs a Children's Program, and
Steve Ross Sings Noël Coward
For tickets, call the Concerts & Lectures Department at 212-570-3949, or visit www.metmuseum.org/tickets, where updated schedules and programs are available.
Tickets are also available at the Great Hall Box Office, which is open
Tuesday-Saturday 10-5:00 and Sunday noon-5:00.
Student and group discount tickets are available for some events; call 212-570-3949.
Tickets include admission to the Museum on day of performance.
Saturday, January 8, 2011, at 7:00 p.m. - Steve Ross – "Songs of Noël Coward"
Steve Ross returns to the Metropolitan Museum for his annual appearances. The cabaret icon performs "Songs of Noël Coward," in which he relates the stories behind the songs of England's most prolific and successful songwriter. He performs "Songs of Fred Astaire" on April 30.
Steve Ross has been at the forefront of the cabaret revival since he became the first cabaret artist in 40 years to perform in the newly opened Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room. He performed regularly at the Oak Room for almost four years, and still returns for sell-out performances. A self-proclaimed Anglophile, Steve was happy to begin dinner cabaret at the Ritz in London. He also performs regularly at London's popular Pizza on the Park. He has played at the Spoleto Festival, the Hong Kong Arts Festival, and the Perth Festival in Australia. He has also performed in Brazil and around the United States, including on- and off-Broadway. In 1989, the BBC asked Steve Ross to host a live cabaret series. He was also the host of a popular radio series for National Public Radio,New York Cabaret Nights, with live broadcasts from cabaret rooms in New York City, featuring noted guests. www.steveross.net
Tickets: $40 (Series: $70)
Saturday, January 15, 2011, at 7:00 p.m. - Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert
"It's hard – very hard – to find better chamber-music playing than at the cellist Edward Arron's series at the Metropolitan Museum, which always mixes new and unusual works in unexpected ways," stated The New Yorker in December 2009 about the Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert. Arron, the ensemble's artistic coordinator, has assembled three programs for 2010-2011, the acclaimed group's eighth season, featuring their usual lively mix of classic and contemporary repertoire. A work by Luciano Berio will be performed on each program.
This second of three programs features Colin Jacobsen, violin; Nicholas Cords, viola; and Edward Arron, cello, performing a program featuring Purcell's Three Fantasias in Three Parts; Berio's Sequenza VIII for Solo Violin (1975); Schubert's String Trio in B-flat Major, D. 581; Giya Kancheli's Rag-Gidon-Time for String Trio (1999); and Beethoven's String Trio in G Major, Op. 9, No. 1.
The third program takes place on April 16.
The 2010-2011 season marks Edward Arron's eighth season as the artistic coordinator of the Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert. In the fall of 2009, Mr. Arron succeeded Charles Wadsworth as the artistic director, host, and resident performer of the Musical Masterworks concert series in Old Lyme, Connecticut, as well as concert series in Beaufort and Columbia, South Carolina. He is also the artistic director of the Caramoor Virtuosi and of the Alpenglow Chamber Music Festival in Summit County, Colorado.
Tickets: $20 (Student tickets: $15)
Saturday, January 22, 2011, at 7:00 p.m. – Pacifica Quartet
In 2009-2010, the Pacifica Quartet, called "one of the fastest rising ensembles today" by The New York Times, became the Metropolitan Museum's second quartet-in-residence, succeeding the Guarneri String Quartet. After a first season of programs of diverse repertoire, the ensemble is devoting its second season to the complete string quartets of Shostakovich in four programs that progress from early to late works.
This third program features String Quartets No. 10 in A-flat Major, Op. 118; No. 9 in E-flat Major, Op. 117; and No. 12 in D-flat Major, Op. 133.
The fourth program takes place on February 19.
Wendy Lesser, author of the book Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, to be published by Yale University Press in March 2011, will host pre-concert conversations before each of the concerts. From 6:15 to 6:45 p.m., Ms. Lesser will talk with a member of the Pacifica Quartet about the composer and the string quartets, and the quartet's experiences performing them.
Recognized for its virtuosity, exuberant performance style, and often daring repertory choices, the Pacifica Quartet has carved out a compelling and critically lauded musical path. In addition to the Musical America and Grammy wins, the Pacifica Quartet has swept top awards in the U.S. and abroad, including the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2006, making the Pacifica only the second chamber music ensemble ever to be selected. Formed in 1994, the ensemble quickly won top prizes in leading international competitions, including the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award.
Having given highly acclaimed performances of the complete Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Carter string quartets in recent seasons, the quartet will present the monumental Shostakovich cycle in Chicago and New York during the 2010-2011 season. In the summer of 2011, the quartet will present the complete Beethoven cycle at Tokyo's famous Suntory Hall, in an unprecedented presentation of five concerts in three days. And in 2011-2012, the quartet will take the Shostakovich cycle to London's Wigmore Hall.
The members of the Pacifica Quartet live in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, where they were appointed to the faculty of the University of Illinois in 2004 and serve as Faculty Quartet in Residence. They are also resident performing artists at the University of Chicago and the Longy School in Boston. Reflecting its dedication to musicians and music lovers of the next generation, the Pacifica Quartet was instrumental in creating the Music Integration Project, an innovative program that provides musical performances and teacher training to inner-city elementary schools. Originating on the West Coast, where it played its earliest concerts together, the quartet takes its name from the Pacific Ocean. Throughout their journey as a string quartet, its members continually strive to be Distinct as the billows/yet one as the sea (James Montgomery). www.pacificaquartet.com
Tickets: $45
Sunday, January 23, 2011, at 3:00 p.m. - Cirène – "One Grain of Rice –
An Exponential Fairytale"
Cirène is an ensemble of some of New York's best young artists – violinist Colin Jacobsen (Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert, The Knights, Brooklyn Rider), cellist Eric Jacobsen (The Knights, Brooklyn Rider), dancer Maile Okamura (Mark Morris Dance Group), percussionist Shane Shanahan (Silk Road Ensemble, Glen Velez's Handance Ensemble), and painter/animator Kevork Mourad (who has also collaborated with the Silk Road Ensemble) – that reimagines timeless tales from around the world and crafts them into presentations of dance, music, and live painting and animation.
The program "One Grain of Rice" uses original music and choreography by the performers and real-time drawing and animation by Kevork Mourad to interpret a folk tale by Demi about a peasant girl who, seeking to help the people of her land in a time of famine, outwits a haughty raja, who has been hoarding all of the food, by asking for one grain of rice, and for each of the following 30 days, double the amount she was given the day before. After agreeing to surrender what he thinks will be a small amount of rice, the raja ends up humbled after giving her, at the conclusion of 30 days, 536,870,912 grains of rice, the total contents of his storehouses.
In this onstage music-and-art collaboration, Kevork Mourad's visual creations are projected behind the musicians, and both spontaneous painting and pre-recorded animations by Mourad join in the storytelling. www.kevorkmourad.com
Tickets $15 for children, $30 for adults
Friday, January 28, 2011, at 7:00 p.m. - Frederic Chiu, Piano - "Monument to Beethoven"
Frederic Chiu, many of whose critically praised thematic programs have taken place at the Metropolitan Museum, performs a concert titled "Monument to Beethoven" for his only New York recital of the season – a program featuring Schumann's Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17 (partly based on one of Beethoven's songs from An die ferne Geliebte); and Liszt's transcription of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67.
As Frederic Chiu says, "In the 1830s a proposed project to erect a monument in Bonn to its most famous son, Beethoven, inspired multiple endeavors. This program presents two major works that emerged during the Beethoven Monument Project, representing both the contrasting dynamics within the Romantic movement, as well as the contrasting personalities of two of the major figures of that movement, Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt."
Frederic Chiu's intriguing piano-playing and teaching springs from a diverse set of experiences and interests: his Asian/American/European background, his musical training, and an early and ongoing exploration of artificial intelligence and human psychology, especially the body-mind-heart connection.
With over 20 CDs on the market, his repertoire includes the complete work of Prokofiev as well as popular classics of Chopin, Liszt, and others, and lesser known masterpieces of Mendelssohn and Rossini, with a special place for the piano transcription. Many have been singled out for such distinctions as "Record of the Year" by Stereo Review and one of the "Top 10 recordings" by The New Yorker.
Frederic Chiu recently premiered Edgar Meyer's Concert Piece with Joshua Bell. He has worked with many composers, including George Crumb, Frederick Rzewski, Bright Sheng, Gao Ping, and David Benoit. He has toured in Europe and the U.S. with the Orchestre de Bretagne and Stefan Sanderling. He has played with the Hartford Symphony, Dayton Philharmonic, Kansas City Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, BBC Scottish Symphony, BBC Concert Orchestra, Estonia National Symphony, and China National Symphony, among others. In recital he performs in the world's most prestigious halls including the Berlin Philharmonic, Kioi and Suntory Halls in Tokyo, Lincoln Center in New York, and Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Mr. Chiu's musical partners include Joshua Bell, Pierre Amoyal, Elmar Oliveira, Gary Hoffman, David Krakauer, Matt Haimovitz, and the St. Lawrence, Shanghai, and Daedalus string quartets. www.fredericchiu.com
Tickets: $45
Also in January 2011 – the following music lectures:
Wednesdays, January 5, 12, 19, 2011, at 2:30 p.m. - David Dubal – "Three Russian
Romantics"
Pianist, teacher, writer, and broadcaster David Dubal delves into the colorful and tragic lives of three great masters in lectures illustrated by performances from The Juilliard School.
January 5: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1840-1893, "Tragedy and Romance"
January 12: Alexander Scriabin, 1872-1915: "Mysticism and Messiah"
January 19: Sergei Rachmaninoff, 1873-1943: "The Last Golden Rays of Romanticism"
Single tickets: $23 (Series: $60)
November 30, 2010
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