Superconductor 2016 Summer Festival Preview I: The Met and the Philharmonic

Free concerts in the parks start the summer season right.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The New York Philharmonic in Central Park.
Photo by Chris Lee © 2015 The New York Philharmonic.

The summer is icumin in and Superconductor is your source for coverage of the festival events that will light up our city in the next three months. We begin with a look at free concert series by the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera that will start the summer off right.

Concert Preview: The Men Who Invented Fire

The Emerson String Quartet is Passing the Torch at Lincoln Center.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

This German card from 1932 depicts Beethoven (left) taking music lessons with Haydn.
The caption reads: "Beethoven and his master, Haydn." © 1932 Homann Factory.

The string quartet has enjoyed over 300 years as one of the sturdiest and most perfect vehicles for musical expression. Quartets can be bold and heroic, as four players join forces to conquer the Everest-like works of Beethoven, or anguished like Schubert's Death and the Maiden. In the 20th century, Shostakovich famously used his late quartets as a kind of intimate diary, inserting hidden codes into the music, and Mozart wrote both joy and heartbreak into the fabric of his mature quartets.

Concert Preview: Philharmonic 360

A return to an old venue and an amazing 2012 finale.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

A seating chart for the Philharmonic's upcoming concert at the Park Avenue Armory.
All images © 2012 the New York Philharmonic.

The New York Philharmonic are ending the 2012 season in grand style with Philharmonic 360, a concert presented in collaboration with the Park Avenue Armory.

It will host the orchestra for two performances on June 29 and 30. The concerts feature an unusual program bridging three centuries of music-making, and an unusual venue, the drill hall of the Armory, itself an historic building dedicated in 1880.

These concerts mark the orchestra's first performances of Gruppen by German composer and enfant terrible Karlheinz Stockhausen. This work (first played in Gotham by student orchestras) is written for three seperate orchestras, with the audience seated in the middle. Talk about sensory overload.

Stockhausen is an important 20th century German composer who was a pioneer in the field of electronic music, creating dense, complicated sound structures that are nonetheless eerily beautiful. His more unusual compositions include the 7-day opera Licht which includes a string quartet incorporating helicopters. Stockhausen's piece won't include any air support, but it still requires three conductors: music director Alan Gilbert, composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg, and Matthias Pintscher.