New York Philharmonic To Return to Indoor Performances for Audiences at The Shed
April 14–15, 2021
Esa-Pekka Salonen To Conduct Works by Pärt, Sibelius, and R. Strauss
The Shed’s McCourt configured for An Audience With… live performance series. Photo: Jasdeep Kang.
The New York Philharmonic makes its first return to live, indoor performances for audiences since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic on April 14 and 15 at 8:00 p.m. As part of The Shed’s new series, An Audience With…, Esa-Pekka Salonen will conduct works composed for smaller ensembles: Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, Sibelius’s Rakastava (The Lover), and Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, A Study for 23 Solo Strings.
The concerts mark the Orchestra’s first appearances at The Shed. The program will be filmed and added to NYPhil+, the Philharmonic’s new streaming platform, later this spring.
Attendance at each concert is limited to 150 (12% of total seated capacity in The Shed’s McCourt space). To be admitted into the venue audience members must present either a negative COVID test result taken within 72 hours of the event, or proof of complete vaccination at least 14 days before the event. All performers and audience members will remain masked during the concerts.
Good to see Rakastava having an outing under a seasoned baton. It was the only work by Sibelius to be performed at the Aldeburgh Festival
in the composer’s Centenary year, 1965.
It remains a rarity today but as it comes in various forms from single/mixed choir , choir and strings and finally, its best form, for strings, timpani and triangle.
Mind you I once attended a performance where the timpanist looked at he score in rehearsal and left immediately saying he only had a bar to play!!
Robert Layton wrote that Rakastava “reveals a vulnerability and innocence that is comparable with that of Schubert. It is a work of astonishing beauty.”