31 Classical-Music Performances We Can’t Wait to Hear This Fall

31 Classical-Music Performances We Can’t Wait to Hear This Fall
Kavalier & Clay at the opera, Dudamel and Salonen at the podium, and more.

By
Justin Davidson,
New York Magazine’s architecture and classical-music critic
since 2007 and was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2002.

Photo-Illustration: Max-o-matic; Photos: Mario Wurzburger/Getty Images; Marty Sohl/The Metropolitan Opera; Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images; Laura Banchi, Courtesy of the Bogliasco Foundation; Milagro Elstak; Kristian Juul Pedersen/AFP via Getty Images; Kaupo Kikkas

This year’s Fall Preview consists of all the entertainment — from TV to video games to theater — that Vulture writers and editors are excited to consume this season. Below, our classical-music list:

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Venue: Geffen Hall

Gustavo Dudamel launches the fall season with a world premiere by the Hawaiian composer Leilehua Lanzilotti and Charles Ives’s panorama of Americana, the Symphony No. 2. Yunchan Lim joins in for Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto.

Venue: Metropolitan Opera

Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel gets the operatic treatment from composer Mason Bates in a production directed by Bartlett Sher.

Venue: Geffen Hall

Conductor Marta Gardolińska makes her Philharmonic debut with a program so full of flash it could be blinding: Mason Bates’s Devil’s Radio, Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 2, and Lutoslawski’s dazzling Concerto for Orchestra.

Venue: Park Avenue Armory

Georg Friedrich Haas encircles the audience with a chamber orchestra plus 50 pianos tuned to explore the microtonal world of notes between the notes.

Venue: Geffen Hall

Esa-Pekka Salonen returns to one of his favorite podiums to lead a program of his favorite composers: Debussy, Bartók, and his mentor, Pierre Boulez.

Venue: Metropolitan Opera

Bellini’s opera about the sleepwalking, sleep-singing Swiss fräulein arrives in a new production directed by the star tenor Rolando Villazón with Nadine Sierra in the title role.

Venue: Carnegie Hall

Opening the Carnegie Hall season is usually the purview of gold-tipped orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic, but this year the honor goes to veterans of the hall’s own youth ensemble.

Venue: Board of Officers Room, Park Avenue Armory

The pianist, who characteristically blends deep thoughtfulness with technique and endurance, in a two-part traversal of Bach’s six partitas.

Venue: Schwarzman Auditorium, Frick Museum

The first full season in the renovated Frick’s new underground hall starts both small and big: one violin, two big chunks of Bach, and a smattering of works by the 17th-century Italian composer Nicola Matteis.

Venue: Church of St. Mary the Virgin

The polar figures of 16th-century Italian choral music, Palestrina, the Apollonian master of elegant counterpoint, and Gesualdo, the violent renegade of plangent harmonies, meet on the same program presented by Miller Theater.

Venue: Alice Tully Hall

Jazzman Etienne Charles tells the story of the neighborhood that Lincoln Center obliterated in a symphonic-scale quilt of Black American styles.

Venue: Carnegie Hall

The master of slow, reverent tones gets a two-part tribute from his countrymen, the Estonian Festival Orchestra and Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir.

Venue: Frick Museum

Paul Agnew leads the early-music ensemble in a program of works from the 17th and 18th centuries revolving around Jerusalem’s identity as a center of Christianity.

Venue: Carnegie Hall

The Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali makes his Carnegie Hall debut leading a work that his country’s plentiful conductors are nurtured on: Sibelius’s Fifth.

Venue: Crypt under the Church of the Intercession

The Parker Quartet and Jay Campbell give Schubert’s dark, profound piece an atmospheric boost by playing it in a place of picturesque spookiness.

Venue: Gilder Lehrman Hall, Morgan Library

The mezzo-soprano delivers the soundtrack to Renoir’s France while an exhibition of his drawings opens in the galleries.

Venue: Frick Museum

Baritone Davóne Tines and the ensemble Sonnambula interweave European music from the 17th century with African griot sagas, narrating the encounters of continents from both sides.

Venue: Geffen Hall

Dalia Stasevska conducts war music from Ukraine and World War II with Joshua Bell performing Thomas de Hartmann’s violin concerto.

Venue: 92NY

The guitarist performs on two instruments (classical and electric) and covers several centuries in a recital that includes a Bach suite, Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, and a Thomas Adès premiere.

Venue: Carnegie Hall

With Kevin Kenner at the piano, the violinist glides through sonatas by Debussy, Schoenberg, Schubert, and Franck.

Venue: Alice Tully Hall

In the great tradition of anthropologically minded composers, Du Yun incorporates folk music from the Jinuo people from Yunnan, China, into her own dramatic work.

Venue: Miller Theater

The theater’s one-composer-per-concert series focuses on landscapes of flickering sonorities and small gestures that bloom into big ones.

Venue: Board of Officers Room, Park Avenue Armory

The recital program of American love songs ranges across music by Sondheim, Copland, and Barber plus an Armory-commissioned work by Jasmine Barnes.

Venue: Geffen Hall

Nicola Benedetti is the soloist in Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto on a program with a new work by Caroline Mallonee and Stravinsky’s Petrushka, conducted by David Robertson.

Venue: Geffen Hall

Three Lincoln Center institutions — the theater, the Metropolitan Opera, and the umbrella organization — join forces to present the 2019 opera about a bereaved family in Harlem, by Jeanine Tesori (whose Grounded opened last season) and librettist Tazewell Thompson.

Venue: 92NY

Benjamin is best known as the composer of hushed, intense scores, but now he and one of his major interpreters perform Benjamin’s new work for two pianos.

Venue: Metropolitan Opera

It’s been more than a decade since Umberto Giordano’s opera of the French Revolution appeared at the Met, and for good reason: It’s tough to find the cast. Now, tenor Piotr Beczala and soprano Sonya Yoncheva justify the return of Nicolas Joël’s production.

Venue: 92NY

A baritone of immense expressive force knocks off all three of Schubert’s song cycles — Die Schöne Müllerin, Winterreise, and Schwanengesang — with pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz.

Venue: 92NY

The fiercely virtuosic group zigzags back and forth through the genre’s history, from Dvořák’s G-Major Quartet, Op. 106, to Haydn’s Quartet No. 2 and Bartók’s Quartet No. 4.

Venue: Carnegie Hall

The Russian pianist, who’s gone from prodigy to phenom to elder all before he’s turned 35, performs works by three compatriots who went on to form the first wave of Soviet composers: Taneyev, Myaskovsky, and Prokofiev.

Venue: Metropolitan Opera

It’s a double-Bellini season at the Met, which on New Year’s Eve stages its first new production of I Puritani since the Carter administration. This one’s by the director and set designer Charles Edwards, with soprano Lisette Oropesa and tenor Lawrence Brownlee.

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31 Fall Classical-Music Performances We Can’t Wait to Hear