Contemporary opera composer Jake Heggie enthused in Gramophone magazine, “The staggering, joyful artistry of Joyce DiDonato reminds us that in any generation there are a few giants…Those who know her repertoire are in awe of her gifts, and those who know nothing of it are instantly engaged…Joyce sings, and the world is suddenly brighter.” DiDonato brought the house down with her luminous, 24-carat voice in her UMS debut at the end of the 2016-17 UMS season in Handel’s Ariodante. She is joined for this very special duo recital by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of both the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera, who trades in his baton for a piano.

A holiday tradition for the whole family, The Nutcracker sweeps the Bolshoi stage for two hours of enchantment and magic.

As the clock strikes midnight on Christmas Eve, Marie’s wooden nutcracker doll comes to life and transforms into a prince! Soon joined by her other toys, Marie and her prince embark on a dreamy, unforgettable adventure. Along with Tchaikovsky’s cherished score and some of the Bolshoi’s greatest artists, The Nutcracker remains a treasure not to be missed.

This steamy presentation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a play that has featured a long line of prominent actresses in the role of Maggie Pollitt, is set in the modern day. Arguably considered Tennessee Williams’s most successful play and a masterpiece of the 20 th century, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955.

This production contains nudity.

Its 10 performers grapple with reveries of life, death, and the mysteries in between. The ingenious and multi-talented Greek artist Dimitris Papaioannou creates productions that can be seen as moving still lifes, always with a strong, distinct visual intensity. Papaioannou does not see himself as a dancer or a choreographer, but as a visual artist, a painter on the stage who creates worlds of astounding beauty from the human body, imbuing life with magic. While he became widely known as the creator of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, his poetic, wordless allegory on the passage of time is a different kind of spectacle.
Please Note: The Great Tamer contains frontal male and female nudity.

Twenty-one singers transform this sweeping Renaissance masterpiece — committed to memory and dramatically staged by acclaimed director Peter Sellars — into an overwhelmingly emotional performance piece, which depicts the seven stages of grief that St. Peter experienced after disavowing his knowledge of Jesus Christ on the day of his arrest and prior to his crucifixion. Sellars approaches Lagrime through a contemporary lens, suggesting that by taking responsibility and facing our pasts head-on, we can forge a more resolved and fulfilling future.

The stellar ensemble of Daniel Hope, Paul Neubauer, and Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center artistic directors Wu Han and David Finckel comes together for an evening of piano quartet classics. Between repertoire favorites of Brahms and Dvorák, the artists offer the warm-hearted piano quartet by the renowned Czech Romantic composer and violinist Josef Suk, a student of Dvorák who eventually became his beloved son-in-law.

Known for high theatricality, gutsy moves, and virtuosic musicality, Camille A. Brown & Dancers soar through history like a whirlwind. Making a personal claim on history through the lens of a modern female perspective, Brown leads her dancers through dazzling excavations of ancestral stories. For this one-night-only presentation, she presents ink, the final installation of the company’s trilogy built on the common theme of identity. ink celebrates the rituals, gestural vocabulary and traditions that remain ingrained within the lineage of the African Diaspora, from generation to generation.

This encore presentation of the National Theatre 2015 broadcast of Shakespeare’s Hamlet features Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch (BBC’s Sherlock, The Imitation Game) in the title role of this epic, lavish production.

Echo in the Valley is the follow-up to acclaimed, self-titled debut that earned the duo a 2016 Grammy for Best Folk Album. This time around, their mission was to take their double-banjo combination of three-finger and clawhammer styles to the next level. Their rules for the recording: all sounds must be created by the two of them, the only instruments used were banjos (they have seven between them, ranging from a ukulele to an upright bass banjo), and they had to be able to perform every recorded song live. Echo in the Valley connects us to our past through wild re-imaginings of traditional Appalachian tunes, with original songs inspired by a man who ferried Syrian refugees to safety and by Native American voices lamenting a distancing from nature.

This concert is part of Zubin Mehta’s final US tour as music director of the Israel Philharmonic — he steps down in October 2019, 50 years after becoming the orchestra’s music advisor and 42 years after becoming its first official music director.
This concert marks the ensemble’s ninth UMS appearance and Zubin Mehta’s tenth since their respective debuts in the early 1970s. Program to be announced.

Simon Russell Beale, who recently appeared on the Hill Auditorium stage portraying Hector Berlioz in a performance by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, stars as Richard II in this visceral new production about the limits of power. An Almeida Theatre production.

The origins of Past Tense lie in Weems’s powerful work Grace Notes, which was inspired by President Obama singing “Amazing Grace” in the wake of the 2015 shooting that killed nine African-American members of a church in Charleston, SC. Weems says, “While working on Grace Notes for months it occurred to me that I was telling the story of Antigone, wherein an innocent man dies by unjustified means, and his sister fights for the right to bury him honorably. But the wider community refuses her; her right to justice, and to peace, is denied.” Weems, looking for permission to “bury our brothers,” incorporates video of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and Eric Garner, among others, into this work that mourns those lives of unknown potential that were ended by those who were supposed to protect them.

The work, dedicated to four of Britten’s friends who were killed during World War I, mixes the Latin words of the Mass for the Dead with poetry of Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action just one week before World War I ended. The work, which has never been performed on a UMS concert, requires huge forces, including large orchestra and chorus, two organs, a chamber orchestra that accompanies the soloists, and a boys’ choir.

Born and raised east of Los Angeles, the six-piece band is remixing roots music and telling modern-day stories. They create a vibrant musical fusion with a unique East LA sound and positive message, a mix-and-match of styles and sources that deliver socially conscious lyrics in both English and Spanish. Their wildly vibrant Afro-Mexican beats, rhythms, and rhymes document stories of a community looking for love and fighting for justice in the concrete jungle of Los Angeles.

The group’s UMS debut features mechanical instruments that have had a place in music history: organ (in this case, Hill Auditorium’s Frieze Memorial Organ), harmonium, harpsichord, music boxes, carillons, and electronic instruments. In Plain Air is a composition in four movements for organ, ensemble, electronics, and customized instruments designed to bring the sonic properties of a large organ into a contemporary concert context, with ICE members providing sonic liaisons to the organ and its rich color combinations.

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma's career is testament to his enduring belief in culture's power to generate trust and understanding. In this special talk, he will explore the role culture can play in helping us to imagine and build a better future, drawing on examples from his own life as a musician and citizen. Ma's presentation is rooted in the belief that, at a moment when our world is challenged by the pace of change and the divisions it can create, culture's ability to create and share meaning is essential in shaping the next stage of our evolution.

Former music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and now the principal conductor of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen carefully balances his time between conducting and composing works that know no limits in either technique or imagination. He makes his UMS debut with this year’s orchestral residency, which includes his Cello Concerto, recently premiered by Yo-Yo Ma.
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Thirty years after photographer and visual artist Robert Mapplethorpe’s untimely death, we still cannot turn away from the compelling emotional complexity of his influential body of work. In Triptych: On the Work of Robert Mapplethorpe, music, poetry, and photography come together in a theatrical context, exploring the impact of the work Mapplethorpe had on the lives and careers of composer Bryce Dessner (The National) and librettist Robert O’Hara, both natives of Cincinnati.

Powerhouse bass-baritone Eric Owens was recently named Musical America’s 2017 Vocalist of the Year and called an “American marvel” who “speaks to you even in his silences…and shakes you when he sings” by the Chicago Sun-Times. Alex Ross, in the New Yorker, noted, “With his sweet tone, fastidious pitch, and poetic phrasing, [Lawrence] Brownlee made familiar fare sound intriguingly fresh, banishing, for a moment, the ghosts of Caruso and Pavarotti.” Together, these two artists, friends for over two decades, share an ease and rapport that is evident through every piece on their program. Program will include opera arias and duets, as well as traditional spirituals, American popular song, and Gospel favorites.

Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo play Shakespeare’s famous fated couple in this great tragedy of politics, passion, and power in a slick, stylish, and modern production that includes a stunning revolving set and gorgeous costumes.

Created in 2016 and based on a traditional and fantastical Chinese tale, La Fresque (The Painting on the Wall) is “infused with sensual beauty.” (Le Figaro) The piece tells the story of a painting come to life and a journey into another dimension, where the picture becomes a place of transcendence and a person can become part of the picture. The ballet seeks to explore the mysterious relations between representation and reality, fixed image and movement, immediacy and duration, the live and the inert.

Centered around three of Shakespeare’s most vivid characters — Caesar, Brutus, and the young Mark Antony — the play contrasts a vast historical canvas with the private fears and dreams of men whose words can change the world. In this production, French director Arthur Nauzyciel adopts the look and style of the late 1960s, when the world is in flux and the national psyche is in turmoil after President Kennedy’s assassination.

Now entering its 44th season, this perennial favorite is back after its six-concert exploration of the complete Beethoven quartets in the 2016-17 season. Joined by New York Philharmonic principal clarinetist Anthony McGill, the Takács Quartet performs Haydn, Shostakovich, and Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet. Brahms had retired from composing when he wrote this piece in 1891, but enthusiastically took it up again when he heard Richard Mühlfeld, the clarinetist who premiered the work. Brahms subsequently composed several additional chamber pieces for clarinet, including a clarinet trio and two sonatas.

Handel never wrote anything more sensuous than Semele, and he tells the story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses about the ill-fated love between Semele and Jupiter in brilliant arias of irresistible theatricality and dazzling coloratura. Harry Bicket and The English Concert are lauded for their Handel presentations, including two previous UMS performances (Radamisto in 2013 and Ariodante in 2017). The New York Classical Review called The English Concert’s Ariodante “a performance so stunning it was liable to make even the most jaded of early-music skeptics take note.”

INSTRUMENTATON
Cécile McLorin Salvant, vocals
Bria Skonberg, trumpet
Melissa Aldana, tenor saxophone
Christian Sands, piano, music director
Yasushi Nakamura, bass
Jamison Ross, drums

Murray Perahia’s place in the pantheon of great musicians is indisputable. With 12 UMS appearances since his debut over 40 years ago, he is one of the most treasured artists to appear on our series and consistently delivers performances that audiences remember years, or even decades, later. After his tour cancellation in spring 2018, we are pleased to be able to add this recital to the 2018-19 Choral Union Series.

As the oldest and most celebrated modern dance company in America, the Martha Graham Dance Company exemplifies its founder’s timeless and uniquely American style of dance, one that has influenced generations of artists and continues to captivate audiences worldwide.
Friday: Secular Games (Martha Graham), New Work (Maxime Doyle & Bobbi Jean Smith), Lamentation Variations (Aszure Barton), Chronicle (Graham),
Thursday: Diversion of Angels (Graham), Ekstasis (Graham), Woodland (Pontus Lidberg), Herodiade (Graham), I used to love you (Annie B. Parson)

Alan Bennett’s hilarious new play is a love letter to regional communities and a thought-provoking but stinging comedy on the reality of funding cuts and care for the aged. This production marks the 10th collaboration between Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner. A Bridge Theatre production.