Concerts in New York in the last ten days of January offer a great blizzard of sounds, nicely burying certain clichés and stereotypes that have attached themselves to this here classical music. Mozart, the perfect cosmopolitan, is at the center. Jan. 20-21: Miller Theatre presents two concerts of classical music from or toward Africa. First a concert by the young South African composer Bongani Ndodana; then a program combining composers from the African continent (Joshua Uzoigwe, Halim El-Dabh, Ndodana, Gyimah Labi) with Western composers who have used African ideas (Xenakis, Reich, Lukas "son of" Ligeti). Jan. 21: Julie Taymor's glorious production of The Magic Flute returns to the Met. On the 25th and the 28th James Levine reprises Così fan tutte, one of the hits of the fall. Jan. 22, 24, 26: Lincoln Center's Passion of Osvaldo Golijov festival begins with three performances of his impassioned flamenco opera Ainadamar, in the new Peter Sellars version (more cogent, more tense) that was first seen at Santa Fe last summer. Upcoming in February are Ayre with Dawn Upshaw, the St. Lawrence Quartet playing Yiddishbuk, and the overwhelming St. Mark Passion (also Feb. 21). Justin Davidson's piece in Newsday explains why Golijov matters. Jan. 22-23: John Eliot Gardiner's Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir present Mozart's Mass in C minor and Requiem, and, on the following night, Symphonies Nos. 39-41. Jan. 23: Hip-hop-inflected composer-violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain plays at the Cutting Room, preceded by Ethel. Jan. 24: The Da Capo Chamber Players play works by Martin Bresnick, Michael Gordon, Derek Bermel, Eric Moe, Philippe Hurel, and Gene Pritsker, and an Uraufführung by Kyle Gann. Jan. 25-28: In four concerts at Carnegie, the Berlin Philharmonic, the world's greatest orchestra, tours its horizon, which Simon Rattle has expanded since his accession to the throne in 2002. Repertory includes the belated New York premiere of Thomas Adès's Asyla, Haydn's Symphony No. 86, the Schoenberg Variations, Ravel's Mother Goose, an all-Mozart program on the big 250th, a new piece by Hanspeter Kyburz, and, yawn, Strauss's Heldenleben and Mahler's Fourth Symphony. Next time, please, less Teutonicism, more Britten or Debussy or Adams. Jan. 24: Anyone who balks at the astronomical ticket prices for the Berlin series might try instead the Houston Symphony, which reportedly has been giving fine, gutsy performances despite having enduring floods, strikes, management problems, and loss of personnel. Pierre Jalbert's new piece big sky is on the program. Jan. 29: Levine and the Met Orchestra present an afternoon of literally murderous twentieth-century masterpieces: Bartók's Miraculous Mandarin Suite, Schoenberg's Erwartung, and the Rite. The volcanic Anja Silja sings the Schoenberg; we'll see if anyone gets out alive. At 4PM this same day, the immaculate Hilliard Ensemble will be singing transcendent works of Gombert, Du Fay, and Josquin at Corpus Christi Church, way uptown, courtesy of the ever-superb Music Before 1800 series. See note on the Hilliard's ECM CD below. Jan. 30: The Collegiate Chorale celebrates the somehow simultaneously overexposed and underrated work of Giacomo Puccini in a concert that ranges from his first opera Le Villi to his unfinished final masterpiece Turandot, whose ending is heard here in the completion by Luciano Berio. Later, the African-American composer Rakim performs at B. B. King's.
