It’s the ides of March, and while I wouldn’t say to beware of any of the music happening this week, there is a bit of heaviness in some of the sung works. There are also some pretty big stars in town, video game music, and the first of a series of concerts among the art at Philadelphia’s newest museum. (To get Fanfare in your inbox, subscribe here.)
Spotlight: The Crossing — Saturday, Derry Presbyterian (Hershey) and Sunday, Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany
Flutist and MacArthur Fellow Claire Chase rejoins The Crossing as they reprise a program from 2023 which gave three premieres. The ensemble commissioned Cuban-American composer Tania León, who responded with Singsong, settings of Rita Dove, our country’s first Black U.S. Poet Laureate, coming from her 2021 book Playlist from the Apocalypse, in dialogue with virtuosic flute passages.
Dove’s poetry “dances its way through a journey of Black singers from pre-slavery to today.” Her “cricket poems” gave the 2023 program its title Crickets in Our Backyard; this time around, Ayanna Woods’ Infinite Body is the title piece. Woods is a Chicago-based composer and was The Crossing’s first composer in residence the year of this program’s premiere. Opening the show is Wang Lu’s At Which Point. If you’re more towards central PA, the choir will be out in Hershey on Saturday, the Philadelphia performance is on Sunday, and for good measure, they’ll be at Carnegie Hall next Tuesday, but that’s not in the scope of this week’s Fanfare.
March 21 at 5 p.m., Derry Presbyterian Church, 248 East Derry Road, Hershey, $12-27, tickets and more information.
March 22 at 4 p.m., Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany, 330 South 13th Street, $7.18-17.85, tickets and more information.
Golda Schultz and Jonathan Ware — Tuesday, Perelman Theater
South African soprano Golda Schultz and American pianist Jonathan Ware made their Philadelphia Chamber Music Society debut four years ago to rave reviews, and they’re back this week with a program called Dark Matter(s). Wasting no time to address the title, the program opens with George Crumb’s Apparition, which uses sections of Walt Whitman’s poetry that directly address the nature of Death. There are more dramatic texts on the subject in Brahms’ Ophelia-Lieder and more accepting ones in Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. Rounding out the program are works by Clara Schumann, Florence Price, and Rita Strohl.
March 17 at 7:30 p.m., Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, 300 South Broad Street, $32, tickets and more information.
Víkingur Ólafsson — Thursday, Marian Anderson Hall
Ensemble Arts’ Brodsky Star Spotlight Series brings us a pianist you’ve heard numerous times on WRTI, Víkingur Ólafsson. The Icelandic pianist gets Marian Anderson Hall all to himself as only an artist who draws ovations comparable to rock stars can. He’s got a new album out on Deutsche Grammophon which just dropped this past Friday, and he’ll be playing through most of it, with works by Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert. I would hazard a guess that for an encore, he might round out the album (another Bach movement), or bring something out from a previous endeavor — his earlier catalogue offers quite the selection.
March 19 at 7:30 p.m., Marian Anderson Hall, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, 300 South Broad Street, $29-128, tickets and more information.
Curtis Chamber Orchestra — Thursday, Perelman Theater
In addition to the numerous free concerts on the Institute’s calendar, the Curtis Chamber Orchestra has a performance in partnership with the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society on Thursday. It’s sold out, so you may as well check out those free recitals, but in case you already have tickets or you want to jump on the waitlist, faculty member Erin Keefe (also concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra) will lead the conductorless orchestra, also performing as a soloist with her boss, Curtis Institute president, violist Roberto Díaz in a sinfonia concertante by Mozart. There’s also a string orchestra arrangement of a Beethoven string quartet, and the program opens with one of the most famous works to come from the school, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
March 19 at 7:30 p.m., Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, 300 South Broad Street, sold out (waitlist at boxoffice@pcmsconcerts.org or 215-569-8080), more information.
Marin Leads Rachmaninoff and Schumann — Friday through Sunday, Marian Anderson Hall
Sergei Rachmaninoff premiered his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with The Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, but down in Baltimore at their Lyric Opera House. Now, former Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Music Director Marin Alsop is Principal Guest Conductor of the Fabulous Philadelphians, and she will lead this work, with Haochen Zhang on the piano, as well as another Philadelphia premiere to open the show, Ukrainian composer Iryna Aleksiychuk’s Go where the wind takes you. Marin is one of the namesakes of the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, who commissioned the work in 2024. She premiered it with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival that year, and picks the work back up to premiere it here in Philadelphia. Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 rounds out the program.
March 20 and 22 at 2 p.m., March 21 at 8 p.m., Marian Anderson Hall, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, 300 South Broad Street, $29-230, tickets and more information.
Artists as Gardens: Gryphon Rue — Saturday, Calder Gardens
The latest addition to the museums along the Ben Franklin Parkway, Calder Gardens, has added a “new garden” to their collection — commissioned events by artists, who are encouraged to think of their work as a garden that changes with the seasons and other natural cycles. The first event will be a commissioned concert by musician, composer, and artist Gryphon Rue, who will perform two sets. The first, at 5:30, will be a solo performance of the title piece of the concert, Cave Rainbow in Negative Color, for magnetic tape. Then, at 7:21 (sunset), Rue will be joined by Julia den Boer on organ and piano and Odetta Hartman on violin for two works by Italian minimalist composer Giusto Pio. Seating will be arranged to create an immersive soundscape in conversation with the art on display, creating dialogue between contemporary music and modern visual masterworks.
March 21 at 5:30 and 7:21 p.m., Calder Gardens, 2100 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, tickets and more information.
Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy — Saturday, Academy of Music
At the end of the movie TÁR, Cate Blanchett’s ultimate punishment is to conduct a concert of video game music for cosplayers. Maybe that’s a career downfall for her, but I think (I hope?) that’s the filmmakers implying that only such a person would see video game music as a bad thing. I imagine conductor Arnie Roth disagrees, as he’s been leading these Final Fantasy orchestra tours for over two decades now, and nearly that long under the branding Distant Worlds. The company has been a leading force in bringing video game music into the concert hall, and it’s worth it for the nostalgia alone, especially if you’re currently (or grew up) a gamer and have played anything from the Final Fantasy series, which has been around long enough (40 years next year) that these are now multigenerational events. Hopefully the parents and kids have some impressive cosplay ready to go.
March 21 at 8 p.m., Academy of Music, 240 South Broad Street, $86-238, tickets and more information.
Looking ahead:
Philadelphia Bach Collective — March 24, St. Mark’s
Portrait of Jessie Montgomery — April 4, Curtis
Imani Winds — April 7, Benjamin Franklin Hall
Lyric Fest — April 10, Benjamin Franklin Hall
Network for New Music — April 18, Haverford College
Falstaff — starts April 18, AVA
