Lincoln Center's fourth annual Summer for the City Festival kicks off June 11 and will run through August 9, with performances taking place across the center's varied theaters, plazas and other public spaces.
Its now-titled Festival Orchestra is back again, under the direction of conductor Jonathon Heyward, featuring works by Brahms, Beethoven, Ravel, and Prokofiev, alongside music by contemporary composers such as Gabriela Lena Frank, Anna Clyne and Imam Habibi. There will be a series of jazz performances, a week of Brazilian music and other cultural events, a celebration of the 20th anniversary of string quartet Brooklyn Rider, a dance festival spotlighting five of the city’s dance companies, a theatrical adaptation of the Indian epic Mahabharata, and its long-running outdoor social dance parties.
Lincoln Center will also open many of its indoor and outdoor spaces to American Modern Opera Company, known as AMOC*, to present a dozen different productions and musical experiences as its own aptly titled, Run AMOC* Festival. Among its productions are a celebration of the works of Julius Eastman; a program bringing together European and Latin Baroque, folk, and contemporary music; and an experimental performance following the evolution of movement. Kicking off the festival will be George Lewis' The Comet/Poppea, a fusion of Claudio Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea and an adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois' science fiction story The Comet, that explores power and race. The work was named a finalist for this year's Pulitzer Prize in Music.
A Tempo host Rachel Katz chats with Lincoln Center Chief Artistic Officer Shanta Thake about some of the festival highlights, and with AMOC* Artistic Director and Co-Founder Zack Winokur about the opera productions.
