Lights On
The Opening Nights Festival celebrates the versatility of Alice Tully Hall

by Heidi Waleson

On Sunday, February 22, viol virtuoso Jordi Savall and his ensemble Hespèrion XXI perform 15th-century Sephardic romances, opening the transformed Alice Tully Hall and launching a new musical era in New York City. The invocation begins the two-week Opening Nights Festival, a cornucopia of significant artists performing all kinds of music, designed as both a celebration and an announcement.

“The hall is so much more than a hall,” explains Jane Moss, Lincoln Center’s Vice President of Programming. “We want to have it enter people’s consciousness as a new facility—a major, exciting destination.”

The festival’s 22 events represent a collaborative effort by the constituents who call Tully their home: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc., The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, The Juilliard School, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. It encompasses a wide variety of genres and eras, representing both the legacy of the hall and its future.

The opening night concert, First Look, is designed as a microcosm of the festival, with music ranging from ancient to modern, and all music constituents are represented. There will be recitals (tenor Mark Padmore and pianist Imogen Cooper perform Schubert on February 25) and orchestra concerts (The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen conducted by Paavo Järvi, offer their signature high-octane Beethoven in two back-to-back programs on March 2). The Chamber Music Society, the hall’s resident since its opening in 1969, presents four diverse programs. Philippe Herreweghe will conduct Bach on period instruments, and there will be eleven premieres. There will also be late-night and free lunchtime concerts.

World music will take the stage (the incandescent quartet of sitarist Ustad Shujaat Khan, producer/composer Karsh Kale, jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, and bassist Jonathan Maron blend classical Indian music, electronica, jazz, and rock on March 7) and so will Stew, the unclassifiable singer/songwriter and creator of the theater piece Passing Strange (March 6).

The Film Society will present the opening night of its popular festival of contemporary French film, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, now in its 14th year (March 5).

Some of the concerts will salute the hall’s history: for example, David Robertson leads the Juilliard Orchestra in Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles (February 26), which was commissioned by Alice Tully and premiered in the hall in 1974. Others will look towards its future, such as the U.S. premiere of the concert version of Vladimir Martynov’s opera Vita Nuova, based on texts by Dante, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, with Mark Padmore and Tatiana Monogarove.

For cellist David Finckel, Artistic Director (with pianist Wu Han) of the Chamber Music Society since 2004, inaugurating the new hall will be a powerful experience. “For the Chamber Music Society, having the hall made over is like having a heart transplant,” says Finckel. “It was built with us in mind, as our home, and it has been our performance venue for our entire existence. Nothing could be better or more appropriate as we approach this milestone—our 40th anniversary. A concert hall is like an instrument, intended to serve the music, the performer, and the public.” Finckel cites the renovation of Jordan Hall in Boston as “a precedent for taking a hall that’s beloved by many, and re-imagining it, taking advantage of all the technologies and conveniences that we have now, but still preserving what is wonderful about it.”

Finckel sees the festival as a way to make the opening of the transformed hall “an important world-wide event for chamber music.” In particular, the four all–Chamber Music Society programs, he says, represent the society’s effort to present itself in a new acoustical environment, unveiling the new acoustics and the new feeling of the hall, and “cementing the relationship between the hall and its public.”

The program of the first Chamber Music Society concert is Coming Home on February 24. “It looks ahead and back,” says Finckel. The Bach Trio Sonata in C major, the same piece that was played to open the hall, represents “a kind of handshake with the past. That will be a special musical experience for anyone in the audience who may have been there in 1969, and we have many subscribers who have been with us for many years. We also have Charles Wadsworth, one of the original performers of that piece in the hall.”

Also on the program is the Beethoven Septet, “one of the classics of chamber music,” and Mendelssohn’s Fugue for String Quartet, “in which you hear the four voices of the quartet in a gentle reveal of each instrument’s sound in the hall. We’re playing Entrelacs by Maresz, a very colorful French work, and two world premieres, including a spatial work by William Bolcom, who came in and mapped out the configuration of musicians placed around the hall. After that concert, you will have heard everything chamber music does.”

With War and Pieces (February 27), the Chamber Music Society moves into theatrical territory. The program, devised by violinist Daniel Hope, features Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat and Beethoven’s “Egmont” Overture in a cabaret-style arrangement, using the same instruments as the Stravinsky, with texts read by actor Klaus Maria Brandauer.

“It’s an experimental program—crossing genres is a very interesting thing to do right now, and Daniel is an amazingly creative guy,” says Finckel.
On March 4 the Belcea Quartet plays Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert, and on March 8 the Chamber Music Society presents a family concert, It’s About Time, a program about rhythm.

“This hall will be a place where young people will be thrilled to come, and we wanted to make a point of that in the festival,” says Finckel.

Alice Tully Hall has long been recognized as a fine venue for period-instrument performance. One of the hall’s last events before closing for renovation was a riveting account of Bach’s St. John Passion, performed by the Collegium Vocale Gent Choir and Orchestra, led by its founder and conductor Philippe Herreweghe in a sold-out concert on Easter Sunday, 2007. After that finale, Moss was eager to invite those artists back to christen the reborn hall, this time with Bach’s Mass in B minor (March 1).

Herreweghe and his ensemble first played the hall in 2000 as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival, and made a number of other visits, including one weekend in 2004, which Herreweghe calls his “Guinness world record” engagement: they played Bach’s St. Matthew Passion on Friday evening in Tully and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis on Sunday in Avery Fisher Hall. Herreweghe is delighted to be returning, both for the hall, and for “the quality of listening public, which is very concentrated.” He is looking forward to performing in the new-and-improved hall.

“I prefer to play Bach in concert halls rather than churches, where there is often too much resonance. We work so hard for each detail, and we want the audience to hear them all.”

Herreweghe, one of the pioneers of the historical performance move­­ment, has been delving into Bach for his entire career.

“In the beginning I worked with people of my own age; now I’m 60, and I’m still working with young people so it is very fresh, but perhaps even better in quality than it was 20 years ago! Many schools now teach authentic instruments, and the players are better and better.”

New music will also have an important place in Tully Hall. That is the signal sent by New York, New Music, New Hall on March 3, a generational portrait of New York’s vibrant contemporary music scene. It features Steve Reich, now the elder statesman of the community, with his ensemble, performing the iconic Music for 18 Musicians; Bang on a Can All-Stars, founded in 1987 to blur the line between classical and pop ensembles; and the relative newcomer, the young 20-member band Alarm Will Sound. The program is preceded by a free performance, the world premiere of a site-specific sound installation, Space, by Phil Kline, performed by the cutting-edge string quartet ETHEL, in the hall’s grand foyer.

“It’s a celebration for the new music community in New York,” says Moss. “One of the things that’s exciting for us about being part of reopening Tully Hall is that it has such fond memories for us,” says David Lang, who founded Bang on a Can with fellow composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe. “We began as a scrappy, messy, seat-of-the-pants festival on the Lower East Side. Our venues were constantly running the risk of being condemned beneath us. We had to set up chairs, clean the toilets, and sell the beer. We enjoyed it—but then we got a call from Jane, who said, how would you like to leave the scruffiness behind and bring what you do to Lincoln Center? It was an inner crisis for all of us, because we liked being scrappy, but it was a great opportunity to take this music we loved uptown. So we did, beginning in the 1993–94 season. We did the Bang on a Can Marathon there, we gave birth to the All-Stars at the Walter Reade Theater. A lot of our life is bound up with Lincoln Center—we changed from a seat-of-the-pants group to grown up organization there, and we owe Lincoln Center a lot.”

Bang on a Can’s program includes a collaboration with Glenn Kotche, the drummer of the rock group Wilco, as well as pieces by each of the founders (Michael Gordon’s is a commission from Lincoln Center for the occasion).

“It’s remarkable to realize that after all these years of considering ourselves to be the upstarts, we are sort of in the middle,” says Lang. “Steve is a great master who we learned so much from, and we were part of launching Alarm. When they were students at Eastman, we presented them and put out their CD. It’s great that Lincoln Center is so committed to young composers, and presenting exciting, high-quality performances of strange music. Lincoln Center, with its tradition and history, is like the temple of established musical culture. What happens there is noticed all around the world, and to put all these alternatives—people who are using their special talents to invigorate the classical tradition—into that temple is a great message.”

In 2002, Stew, a singer-songwriter with a wryly named band, The Negro Problem, was playing clubs and had just released an album, The Naked Dutch Painter. He then received a surprise call from Jon Nakagawa, Lincoln Center’s Director of Contemporary Programming, inviting him to appear on the American Songbook series.

“We were shocked. We thought, a rock band at Lincoln Center, that’s like bringing a classical orchestra to the barn dance,” Stew recalls. “But we realized that Jon was trying to shake things up. We were not a safe bet. We weren’t big luminaries from the indie rock world, with hundreds of thousands of records sold. We were playing small clubs—not even downtown—we were underground! But Jon heard our music and believed in it, and my view of those kinds of institutions changed. Lincoln Center was really ready to reach out, and not just talk about diversity and eclecticism.”

Stew and his writing partner, bassist Heidi Rodewald, played in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse for American Songbook in 2003. On March 6 he headlines a show at the new Alice Tully Hall. The venue is more than quadruple the size of the Kaplan Penthouse, and things have changed for Stew in the meantime. A theater residency at Joe’s Pub grew into a Broadway show, Passing Strange, which won a Tony Award. Spike Lee’s film of Passing Strange premiered at Sundance in January 2009.

“We’re going to do everything at Tully,” says Stew. “It’s going to be a real career retrospective, with songs we did back in ’97 in Hollywood, brand new songs, and everything in between. We’ll have a string, a horn section, and special guests. We want to rock the place!”

Passing Strange closed in July 2008, and Stew is looking forward to getting back to his roots.

“The invitation couldn’t have come at a better time, bringing us back in style,” he says. “Heidi and I don’t consider ourselves theater artists: we are songwriters, a rock band. After two years of doing theater, we want to get loose!”

Stew is also looking forward to introducing his Passing Strange fans to another side of him.

“There are all these people who haven’t seen us in our live, uncut, anything-can-happen version,” he says. “It’s a new beginning.”

Just like Alice Tully Hall.

Heidi Waleson is the opera critic of the Wall Street Journal.