CLASSICAL MUSIC

SEP. Medea Metropolitan Opera, opens 9/27

The Met opens its season with a 225-year-old work that’s new to its repertoire. Like the soprano in a drawnout tragic finale, Cherubini’s opera has died several deaths, starting right after its premiere in 1797. Maria Callas was the title character’s most celebrated resuscitator in the 1950s; now, Sondra Radvanovsky takes a crack at the role in a new production by David McVicar.

Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) Park Avenue Armory, 9/27–10/8

Rothko Chapel— a real chapel, decorated with work by Mark Rothko—opened in Houston in 1971. One year later, Morton Feldman celebrated it with a composition. Now, 50 years after that, Tyshawn Sorey has composed and performed a new work to honor both. Sorey’s score arrives in New York as a staged piece directed by Peter Sellars with artwork by Julie Mehretu and choreography by Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray.

Philadelphia Orchestra Carnegie Hall, 9/29

Conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphia Orchestra opens the season for the second year in a row, this time joined by pianist Daniil Trifonov.

OCT. San Juan Hill: A New York Story David Geffen Hall, 10/8

Lincoln Center was constructed on the rubble of a large, dense, multiethnic neighborhood once known as San Juan Hill. The jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles evokes that vanished swath of Manhattan in a new work commissioned by Lincoln Center for the New York Philharmonic to inaugurate the renovated David Geffen Hall.

Everything Rises BAM, 10/12–10/15

the reticent; classical musicians may bare their souls, but they tend to stay silent about who they are. Now, bass-baritone Davóne Tines and violinist Jennifer Koh blend performance, visual projection, and autobiography in a new stage work composed by Ken Ueno and directed by Alexander Gedeon.

NY Phil Returns Home David Geffen Hall, 10/12

Getting back to the workplace has been a complicated affair for millions, but the New York Philharmonic’s musicians have had a longer exile than most. David Geffen Hall, gutted and rebuilt during the pandemic closure, welcomes them back in a blaze of music by Tania León, Marcos Balter, John Adams, and Ottorino Respighi, conducted by music director Jaap van Zweden.

Maurizio Pollini Carnegie Hall, 10/16

Fingers ablur, notes precise, Pollini has spent decades playing with an almost spiritual reverence for precision and speed. In his ultranimble hands, you feel the sun glinting off Schumann and sense the gearworks in Chopin. At 80, Pollini returns to Carnegie Hall after an absence of more than three years.

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Carnegie Hall, 10/22

A regional orchestra from the U.K., the CBSO has a stellar record of selecting music directors who will later become stars—Simon Rattle, Sakari Oramo, and Andris Nelsons all held the job. Their successor is Mirga GražinyteTyla, joined for the Elgar cello concerto by soloist Sheku Kanneh-Mason.

Song of the Ambassadors Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, 10/25

We’ve seen dancing robots, self-driving cars, and customerservice chatbots, but what can AI do for opera? Composer Derrick Skye, the musician and technohealer K AlladoMcDowell, and the digital artist Refik Anadol take on that question in this stage work, still in development, that translates one person’s brain activity into real-time projections.

Los Angeles Philharmonic Carnegie Hall, 10/25 and 10/26

Gustavo Dudamel conducts a new violin concerto by each of his two favorite Mexican composers, Gabriela Ortiz and Arturo Márquez. (The soloists are María Dueñas for the first and Anne Akiko Meyers for the second.) Oh, yes, and a couple of meaty symphonies, too: Mahler’s First and Copland’s Third.

NOV. A Steve Reich Celebration Carnegie Hall, 11/1

Every time Reich reaches another milestone birthday, it triggers a round of tribute concerts. Now, at 85, he’s composed a new work called Traveler’s Prayer, to be performed at this tribute alongside his landmark works Music for 18 Musicians and Tehillim.

Berliner Philharmoniker Carnegie Hall, 11/10–11/12

The orchestra of orchestras (well, one of them) returns, now led by its new chief, Kirill Petrenko, for a threeconcert series that includes two showcase performances of Mahler’s colossal Symphony No. 7 and one of the virtuosically colorful Unstuck, by the kindasorta-Mahlerian American composer Andrew Norman.

The Hours Metropolitan Opera, opens 11/22

Michael Cunningham’s novel—which intertwines the dayin-the-life stories of Virginia Woolf, a mid-20th-century L.A. housewife, and a 1990s lesbian—has already yielded a movie, and now it gets the operatic treatment from composer Kevin Puts. Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and sopranos Renée Fleming and Kelli O’Hara are in the three main roles.