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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. With summer coming New York's culture scene heats up with festivals, concerts, movies, and more seemingly around every corner or on every rooftop or parking lot. With help from WNYC and Gotham as Culture and Art Desk, we are wrapping up our shows during this membership drive with your guide to what to look forward to this summer. Today, culture and art editor Steve Smith is back with us to talk about more great concerts coming our way, our third day in a row, talking about concerts this time specifically for you fans of classical music, opera, or jazz. Steve, hey, welcome back to the show.
Steve Smith: Hi, Brian. Freaks, nerds, and weirdos, I'm going to cop to being a nerd. I'll leave the rest of someone else's discretion.
Brian Lehrer: Okay. We will leave the definition for people to imagine.
Steve Smith: [laughs]
Brian Lehrer: Let's see. If you love the musical Rent, a low-cost way to see where it came from coming on June 1st.
Steve Smith: Absolutely, you are so correct. Part of Bryant Park Picnic Performances New York City Opera is kicking off the summer June 1st with a performance of Puccini's La bohème. This is about as indestructible a work as exists anywhere in the operatic canon. It's a story anyone can relate to. Even if you get tired of reading projected translations, the music is so stunningly beautiful. You can basically close your eyes and it'll tell you everything you need to know. New York City Opera is going to be presenting two more operas this summer. Rossini's Barber of Seville, and Gounod's Romeo and Juliet, and there's going to be a recital of popular Italian tenor [unintelligible 00:01:46] sung by Alessandro Lora. They're well represented this summer at Bryant Park.
Brian Lehrer: All at Bryant Park. That is cool. Let's see in addition to the New York City Opera, there's Carnegie Hall Jazz Mobile and more. I see Carnegie Hall is bringing Arturo O'Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra. He's a friend of the show. We talk music and politics with Arturo O'Farrill from time to time, also in Bryant Park, July 7th.
Steve Smith: Absolutely. O'Farrill's Band is one of New York City's most consistently excellent groups. Definitely everyone can take advantage of seeing this band. If they're not familiar with the band, well you don't have to worry about getting your money's worth. You can take a chance on something unfamiliar. Bryant Park also, speaking of Carnegie Hall series, has the wonderful Mexican jazz singer, Magos Herrera, performing with a chamber orchestra called The Knights just two weeks later on July 21st. Again, go out and take a chance.
Brian Lehrer: Lincoln Center has its Summer for the City festival, all kinds of offerings, including this one that crosses genres and looks intriguing. The Arun Ramamurthy Trio, which their website says "fuses South Indian Carnatic classical, western classical, and contemporary jazz into a lively storm of cross-cultural sound." It sounds really cool for me. That's at the David Rubenstein Atrium coming up pretty soon, June 7th.
Steve Smith: That's right. I'm going to put that one on my calendar, Brian. I don't know that particular group, but it sounds fascinating. Like you said, the David Rubenstein Atrium really is one of the city's hidden treasures. There's a lot of fascinating programming that goes on there, a lot of cross-cultural experimentation. I think pretty much everything is free and it's just a neat little space to hang out in.
Brian Lehrer: I've heard some other Jazz/Indian classical fusion pieces, which have been really good. We'll see how this group does it.
Steve Smith: That's right.
Brian Lehrer: Lincoln Center is also the home base for the New York Phil obviously and Metropolitan Opera, both of which have summer programs, plus the annual Mostly Mozart Festival, which is a summer thing. What's new from any of those this year?
Steve Smith: Oh, deep breath here. The New York Philharmonic is hitting the city's parks again. This is the last go round for music director Jaap van Zweden, who is stepping down after the 2023/'24 season. The program includes popular pieces by Beethoven, Rossini, and Copeland, so you really can't go wrong, but it also very thoughtfully includes new pieces by participants in the orchestra's Very Young Composers program. The series starts at Van Portland Park in the Bronx on June 13th, and then Central Park Cunningham Park in Queens and Prospect Park in Brooklyn follow in the days right after that.
Metropolitan Opera is also going to be out in the parks launching its popular annual series of outdoor recitals. That starts in Central Park on June 20th, where you'll hear two singers who are featured in starring roles next season. It's a great little preview of soprano, Gabriella Reyes, and baritone, Will Liverman. You'll also hear tenor Renée Barbara, who made a really strong impression in the Met Opera's recent staging of Der Rosenkavalier. That same program happens again at Brooklyn Bridge Park on June 23rd.
The Met is also hosting its very popular summer HD series on Lincoln Center Plaza, where they're projecting videos of past performances of operas. The season starts on August 25th, not with an opera, but with a screening of the beloved feature film Moonstruck.
While we are at Lincoln Center yes, indeed. The Mostly Mozart festival orchestra is part of Lincoln Center's Summer for the City festival. They have a couple of free workshops and an outdoor concert on July 22nd, and then they have a series of 12 Pay What You Wish concerts in David Geffen Hall. We're saying Farewell to music director Louis Langrée after 21 transformative seasons. You really don't want to miss out on checking out at least one
Brian Lehrer: More on the contemporary classical front, I see there's something called the TIME:SPANS Festival in Hell's Kitchen. It's time colon spans, I think, and the Rite of Summer Music Festival on Governors Island. What can you tell us briefly about those?
Steve Smith: Sure. You bet. TIME:SPANS is a really illuminating look into the cutting edge of modern composition. It covers a lot of territory and it always features New York's best ensembles plus international visitors. The festival is happening at the DiMenna Center, August 12th to 26th. Tickets are really inexpensive, just $20 a night or $10 for students, and seniors.
Rite of Summer is a free festival that happens outdoors on Governors Island, one program a month. This year. It starts with The Jazz WaHi Composers Sextet, WaHi standing for Washington Heights, followed in subsequent months by the Dublin Guitar Quartet and Public Quartet. It's really a wonderful series, weather permitting
Brian Lehrer: Real quick, free jazz. Will the Jazzmobile be out and about this summer again?
Steve Smith: The Jazz mobile will indeed be out, although they haven't announced a whole lot of specifics yet. You definitely want to look for their presentation of Jason Moran and his Big Bandwagon at Marcus Garvey Park on August 18th. They're doing a great program dedicated to the historic figure, James Reese Europe, who took jazz from smokey nightclubs to concert halls and to the front lines in France during World War I. A brilliant program. Again, Marcus Garvey Park on August 18th.
Brian Lehrer: Wow. Jason Moran is so great, even without anybody else with him on piano. If he's got an interesting group of musicians with him, that ought to be awesome. We will leave it there as we thank Steve Smith, Gothamist WNYC's culture and art editor for coming on three days in a row and talking about music coming to town this summer. Steve, thank you so much. Have a great weekend.
Steve Smith: Thank you, Brian.
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