Long Play Festival
Brooklyn, NYC, 3-5 May
Before August’s eclectic Long Weekend and July’s Summer Festival, there’s the small matter of a May prequel – Bang on a Can’s Brooklyn bonanza of some 60 concerts of new and newish music. Corralled into three exuberant days, premieres world, US and New York come thick and fast. Included are the Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith, Anna Meredith’s Nuc and, performed by Ensemble Klang, Peter Adriaansz’s Environments. But contemporary classics are not airbrushed. The Ligeti Quartet salutes its namesake; the music of Steve Reich re-echoes; and Ekmeles illuminates David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion.
May Festival
Cincinnati, OH, 17-25 May
It’s all change in Cincinnati. Last year’s 150th-birthday celebrations concluded, the choralfest steps out with a new festival director at the helm. Pulitzer-Prize-winning co-founder of Bang on a Can, Julia Wolfe curates a series bookended by Haydn’s The Creation and Fauré’s Requiem. In between, the world premiere of her own All that Breathes spearheads a mini-Wolfe retrospective including the oratorio Anthracite Fields and Her Story.
Spoleto Festival USA
Charleston, SC, 22 May – 9 June
Composer Gian Carlo Menotti had an eye for old world charm – and looking to establish an American equivalent to his Italian Festival of Two Worlds, in Charleston he found it in spades. A man of the musical theatre to his fingertips, he’d applaud Spoleto 2024’s curtain-up: the world premiere of Layale Caker’s new opera . In part drawing on Greek mythology, it neatly complements another festival premiere reinterpreting Virgil’s . Theatre and dance weave around a core music programme that features Reena Esmail as composer-in-residence in an 11-concert chamber music series; the Festival Orchestra pairs Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 with a new Cello Concerto by Nathalie Joachim – and joins the Festival Chorus for Haydn’s . In conversation and music, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, meanwhile, ponders Bach, life and the universe.
