MUSIC / THEATER
TUESDAY & WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29 & 30, 2019
7:30 PM

Zauberland
White Light Festival
Gerald W. Lynch Theater, John Jay College
524 West 59th Street, Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan

$35-$75
http://www.lincolncenter.org/white-light-festival/show/zauberland

Schumann's Dichterliebe (to marvelous texts by Heine) is the greatest Austro-German Romantic song cycle that isn't by Schubert — or maybe the greatest that isn't Winterreise. Here, it's surrounded by new songs by the organist/composer Bernard Foccroulle (to texts by Martin Crimp, who's on a roll) and theatricalized to address, instead of the vicissitudes of love, the circumstances of Middle Easterners trying to immigrate to a magic land that one presumes stands for Europe. When the singing is by the biting, incandescent Julia Bullock, and the piano-playing is by the eloquent, precise Cedric Tiberghien, you know you don't have to worry about musical values.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT: Taboon — named for its magnificent wood-fired oven — has been superseded by other Modern Israeli restaurants in New York. But they aren't down the street from John Jay College.