OPERA
THURSDAY - SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 - 28, 2019
7:30 PM THURSDAY
8:00 PM FRIDAY & SATURDAY

Bartók: Bluebeard's Castle / Schoenberg: Ewartung
New York Philharmonic
David Geffen Hall
10 Lincoln Center Plaza, Upper West Side, Manhattan

$29-$79
https://nyphil.org/concerts-tickets/1920/bluebeards-castle

Two masterpieces of Expressionist music-theater. You might say that Bluebeard's Castle explores marriage while Ewartung explores an extreme form of breaking up. (You might say also that Your Compiler should stop with the glib japery when such towering works are at issue.) Or you might just say that Bluebeard's Castle provides an almost unmatchable musico-dramatic experience, with tonal sound made to do things you didn't know it could; while the music of Ewartung captures such extreme emotional intensity that you can understand why Schoenberg soon thereafter abandoned this freely atonal Expressionism for a much more constrained idiom: you sense that he almost couldn't go on writing this stuff. This will be a semi-staged production (personally, I prefer semi- or even unstaged performances of at least Bluebeard, as the physical productions never seem to live up to the one I've formed in my head) by the Swedish stage designer Bengt Gomér. But the real casting coup is Gomér's wife as the female protagonist in the Bartók: Nina Stemme is one of the great dramatic sopranos of our time — worthy of comparison, in terms of vocal security and emotional projection, with the greats of the past.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT: Pan-Mediterranean at Boulud Sud.