“Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s Metropolitan Opera appointment [as Music Director] will become a more tangible reality in August when Met stars Isabel Leonard, Susanna Phillips, and Matthew Polenzani perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra to close out the Philadelphians’ annual summer residency at Saratoga Performing Arts Center,” writes David Patrick Stearns in Monday’s (2/6) Philadelphia Inquirer. “The Saratoga schedule, announced Sunday, runs Aug. 2-19 and is the first under Elizabeth Sobol, the new president and CEO at the center…. This summer’s Saratoga season is organized similarly to recent Kimmel Center mini-festivals: Each week is devoted to a different nationality of music. Orchestra concerts Aug. 2-4, conducted by principal guest conductor Stéphane Denève, will be a Russian festival…. Guest conductor Marin Alsop and cellist Yo-Yo Ma open the Aug. 9-11 American festival…. Nézet-Séguin conducts the French festival, Aug. 17-19…. The key word to her approach, says Sobol, is ‘immersive,’ pointing to connections between the orchestra’s Aug. 9 performance of John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine and the New York City Ballet’s July 5 dance piece set to the same composer’s Fearful Symmetries.” Also scheduled is Pat Metheny’s Duo Concerto for Vibraphone and Marimba “in a version arranged by the orchestra’s principal percussionist, Christopher Deviney.”
Posted February 8, 2017
