Suffering from a nasty cold, I failed to make it out to Brooklyn last night for Michael Christie's first concert as head of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Steve Smith has the early report. It is encouraging that Christie's podcast discussing his first program opens with a citation of Grimaldi's, the second-best pizza in the land (or the best, if you consider Berkeley's Cheese Board something other and higher than pizza). It will be a great thing if Christie regains some of the extraordinary energy that the Brooklyn Philharmonic had under Robert Spano. On Monday night the French Institute begins a very promising-looking series of programs entitled Wagner Our Contemporary. The first event is titled "Wagner, Philosopher or Impostor?" — the answer, as always with Wagner, is "both" — and it combines a new Michael Hersch orchestration of the Wesendonck Lieder with selections from the peculiar, not very good, yet contextually fascinating music of Friedrich Nietzsche. Later on we'll get Fauré and Chabrier's famous Wagner parodies Souvenirs de Bayreuth and Souvenirs de Munich and Salvatore Sciarrino's avant-garde meditation Lohengrin, where the swan ends up going to the moon. This is some extremely smart programming, by Nurit Pacht. On Tuesday, I plan to see the Here & Now presentation of Harbison's new Milosz Songs at the Philharmonic (Spano at the helm), then head to Carnegie for Esa-Pekka Salonen's Insomnia with the Philadelphia, while thinking some more about the Grosse Fuge.
Update: Alternatively, there's the new Cello Sonata by the very gifted Lera Auerbach, which David Finckel and Wu Han are playing at the Chamber Music Society. Here's a report by Christian Herzog.
