It's time to renew your What Makes It Great? Subscription for the 2019-20 season!
If you're currently a subscriber for the 2018-19 season, you can renew your subscription online or call the Box Office at 212 501 3330.
Deadline to keep your seats and save 30%: May 15, 2019
Mon, Sep 16, 2019
BEETHOVEN'S “ARCHDUKE TRIO”
Featuring the Horszowski Trio
Widely considered to be the greatest piano trio ever written, Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio represents a defining, transformational moment in the history of Western music. A revolution in musical content as well as well as in how it was commissioned and financed, it replaces the polite, private amateur world of chamber music with virtuosic public music of symphonic scope. Chamber music would never be the same!
Mon, Nov 4, 2019, 7:30 pm
THE MUSIC OF RICHARD RODGERS
Featuring Broadway stars Sally Wilfert & Michael Winther
In a field where composers routinely collaborated with many different lyricists over the course of their careers, Richard Rodgers wrote more than 40 shows over 42 years with only two partners: Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. Kapilow explores both of these wildly successful partnerships, which produced Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, Pal Joey, A Connecticut Yankee and many more.
Join Rob and the performers at a post-concert book signing celebrating the release of his new book: Listening for America: Inside the Great American Songbook from Gershwin to Sondheim (W.W. Norton & Company).
Mon, Dec 16, 2019, 7:30 pm
DREAMING OF A JEWISH CHRISTMAS: CHRISTMAS SONGS BY JEWISH COMPOSERS
Featuring vocalists Gabrielle Stravelli & Michael Winther, plus choruses from Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School
Come hear and think about some of the most beloved and celebrated Christmas songs in a whole new way! Rob Kapilow tells the surprising stories behind your favorite holiday songs, including “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Silver Bells” – all written by Jewish composers. The story of how this came to be is a remarkable tale of immigrant outsiders who rejected their parents’ European pasts, embraced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood, and began to write the soundtrack to America’s dreams.
Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 7:30 pm
BEETHOVEN'S SYMPHONY NO. 7
Featuring the Manhattan School of Music Chamber Sinfonia
Goethe called Beethoven enormously talented, but a “completely untamed personality.” Weber thought that the 7th Symphony showed that Beethoven was “ripe for the madhouse.” Beethoven’s contemporaries thought his music was as difficult, defiant, radical and as untamed as the man himself. Yet today the 7th Symphony has become an icon of classical music, as canonical as any symphony ever written. How did this happen? Can we rehear this iconic work as the disturbing, eccentric, radical untamed masterpiece it was for Beethoven’s contemporaries?
Mon, Mar 30, 7:30 pm
CHOPIN PIANO SONATA NO. 2 (including the “Funeral March”)
Featuring Soyeon Kate Lee, piano
It is hard to imagine a movement of classical music more famous than the Funeral March of Chopin’s B-flat minor sonata, one of the most iconic piano sonatas ever written. Written two years before the rest of the sonata, it is the emotional and structural heart of the entire work. Yet it leads to one of the most enigmatic, disturbing, Sphinx-like finales ever written – a movement so strange that even today, it can sound like contemporary music. The sonata’s unpredictability, structural freedom and wide-ranging drama led Schumann to claim it was too formless to even be called a sonata, but rather simply Chopin’s attempt to bind together four of his “most reckless children.” Was Schumann right, or was Chopin simply reinventing what a sonata could be in a way that Schumann was unable to grasp?
