The above photo, from Baltimore, is of no relevance to the text below.
Tonight is an obvious candidate for this season's Night of Too Many New-Music Concerts in NYC. You can choose among the Borromeo Quartet playing Reich's Different Trains and Beethoven's Opus 130 at Tenri; the Ensemble ACJW, at Zankel Hall, performing Takemitsu's Tree Line, Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony, and Reinbert de Leeuw's In the Lovely Month of May under the direction of de Leeuw (who, I'll keep saying until I'm blue in the face, is a great conductor); The Knights at Weill Hall; the first of four performances of Elliott Carter's What Next? at Miller Theatre (the last performance, next Tuesday, will fall on the composer's 99th birthday); a rendition of Tan Dun's The Gate by the Brooklyn Philharmonic; Lukas Foss's children's opera Griffelkin at the Manhattan School; counter)induction playing a new work by Ryan Streber, among other pieces, at Christ and St. Stephen's; the debut at Brooklyn Heights' First Presbyterian Church of Ensemble de Sade, which aims to bring out the "masochism and sadism" inherent in the traditional concert experience in a program of Schoenberg, Penderecki, Nyman, and Zorn; the International Contemporary Ensemble doing Stockhausen (Donnerstag-Abschied), Saariaho, Xenakis, and Reich in conjunction with the Moving Theater at the Whitney; thingNY at Yippie Museum Café; and works of Eve Beglarian and Jacob ter Veldhuis at the Movado Hour. (Much of the above comes courtesy of Steve Smith's Time Out New York listings.) On Saturday night the Japan Society presents the last of three performances of Harry Partch's legendary and long-neglected Delusions of the Fury, which Tony Tommasini reviewed glowingly in the New York Times. This has been sold out for a while, but some unclaimed tickets may be available before the start of the performance. On Sunday Da Camera of Houston presents the first of two performances of a Dada and Jazz program at the Guggenheim. And on Wednesday the Talea Ensemble plays at Tenri. I will of course be at all these concerts, thanks to my newly acquired superpowers.
