Monday Night in Fresh Meadows: New York Philharmonic 51st Annual Summer Concerts in the Park at Cunningham Park

(Video courtesy BoricuaRick)

(Video courtesy plowplum)

Friday Night in Prospect Park: New York Philharmonic 51st Annual Summer Concerts in the Park at the Middle Long Meadow

(Videos courtesy Vladimir Efros)
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Late Saturday Afternoon in Dumbo: The International Street Cannibals present "Mozart's Inside Game: An Educational Concert" at Gleason's Gym

(Video courtesy Sandi Bachom)

Monday Night in the West Village: Morningside Opera presents "¡Figaro! (90210)" at the New School for Drama

Tonight Morningside Opera began its run of ¡Figaro! (90210), an amazing adaptation of the Mozart opera written by the brilliant Vid Guerrerio. Below are some scenes from a concert version from last fall and Zachary Woolfe's rave review from the New York Times:

“¡Figaro! (90210),” Morningside Opera’s blasphemous, brilliant new adaptation of “Le Nozze di Figaro,” owes Peter Sellars an even greater debt than it does Mozart and Da Ponte.

It was Mr. Sellars who in 1988 set “Figaro” in an apartment in the Trump Tower, the better to bring out the work’s continued relevance to an era still struggling with the issues of class and power that bedeviled the 18th century.

“Thank God the feudal system remains firmly in place in the United States of America in the ’90s,” Mr. Sellars said when the production was broadcast on television a few years later. While he used the original Italian text, “¡Figaro! (90210)”. . . goes several steps further. It retains the opera’s music — even its aria-and-recitative format — but freely riffs on Da Ponte’s libretto in English and Spanish, with slang-filled lyrics that move the action to a Beverly Hills mansion today.

In this version, fearlessly written by Vid Guerrerio, Susanna (excuse me, Susana) and Figaro are undocumented Mexican workers employed by the Contis, a real estate magnate and his aging-actress wife. The randy adolescent page Cherubino has become Li’l B-Man, an aspiring rapper pursuing the Contis’ daughter. (“Ma’am, I don’t mean to sound twisty or pervy,” goes one line in his rejiggered “Non so più.” “Damn, I just love when a body’s all curvy.”)
The stakes could not be more current, clear or urgent: Figaro and Susana face deportation if they rock the boat — if Susana refuses Mr. Conti’s advances. That “¡Figaro! (90210),” seen on Saturday evening, remains uproariously funny under the cloud of such serious matters speaks to Mr. Guerrerio’s ingenious text and the smooth, clever production, adroitly directed on a nearly bare stage by Melissa Crespo.
Joined by a six-member orchestra led with verve and precision by Raphael Fusco, the cast energetically inhabited a world both realistically contemporary and timelessly comic, creating characters simultaneously stereotypical and personal. Two sopranos — Donata Cucinotta as Mrs. Conti and Sophia Benedetti as Susana — were particularly fine, but there was no weak link in an ensemble that also included the baritone Robert Balonek as Mr. Conti, the bass-baritone Carlos Monzón as Figaro and the vocally and physically agile tenor Anthony Chatmon II as Li’l B-Man.
If there was something jarring about the final chorus of reconciliation — a celebration of American multiculturalism — coming after the exposure of so much injustice and bad behavior, that was in keeping with the original. Much more than the proto-revolutionary Beaumarchais play on which the opera is based, Mozart and Da Ponte — and, now, “¡Figaro! (90210)” — seek to moderate social critique, to show both good and bad in everyone.

All people are horrible, one character in “¡Figaro! (90210)” points out. “But not all the time, that’s the key.”

Friday Night in Dumbo: The Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital Series with Danielle de Niese, Dimitri Pittas and John Del Carlo at Brooklyn Bridge Park

We had the pleasure tonight of being in the large audience on the grass of Pier 1 at Brooklyn Bridge Park to catch this year's fabulous Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital Series, with tonight's program featuring three Met stars: soprano Danielle de Niese, tenor Dimitri Pittas, and bass-baritone John Del Carlo, as well as pianist Dan Saunders.

Tuesday Night at the Williamsburg Waterfront: Orchestra of St. Luke's plays "Just Add Water" concert of summer favorites at East River State Park

Tonight, as the day's awful heat and humidity subsided slightly, we went over to East River State Park at the Williamsburg Waterfront for a delightful ninety-minute concert, "Just Add Water," with the Orchestra of St. Luke's playing summer favorites from Bach and Mozart to Joplin, Bernstein, Copeland and Lennon & McCartney.

We arrived at the park really early. Although most of these seats never filled up, there was a decent-sized crowd of all different ages, including tons of little kids with their parents.

It's just that most of the audience sitting at the benches on the concrete section in front of the stage or in the VIP section seats off to the side, or as most people were, lying on the grass close to the stage and out by the water.

The music carried. First, members of the Orchestra of St. Luke's Brass Ensemble played the three movements of the Russian composer Victor Ewald's Brass Quintet No. 1 Op. 5 (in B flat, we think).

Next the Brass Ensemble played songs from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess like the obvious "Summertime" and "A Woman Is a Sometime Thing." It was incredibly pleasant to be sitting there as a breeze wafted in from the East River.

The ensemble also played the Bach's 7th Symphony contrapuntal and "When the Saints Go Marching In" as they were joined by some strings.

Then, after a brief intermission, the whole Orchestra of St. Luke's came onstage, with Gary Fagin conducting and doing a wonderful job of putting the evening's program of classics into historical perspective for a general audience.

It was a splendid, easy program for a summer night as the sky darkened and an almost-full moon took the place of the warm sun: from Haydn's Fireworks and Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik to the classic ragtime of Scott Joplin's The Entertainer and Bethena Waltz as well as Tom Turpin's St. Louis Rag.

Then there were favorite selections from Gershwin's An American in Paris, Richard Rodgers' "Bewitched" from Pal Joey, medleys of Beatles songs by Lennon and McCartney and Star Wars by John Williams, West Side Story by Bernstein, and Aaron Copland's Hoedown from Rodeo. And the encore was a lovely movement from Schumann's Kinderszenen.

Saturday Evening in Midtown: The Brooklyn Philharmonic at the Bryant Park Fall Festival

After a quiet Yom Kippur spent reading and reflecting and walking around our neighborhood in Williamsburg, watching our neighbors wash their cars and kids tossing around a football and a young novelist selling some books from his stoop on Graham Avenue, we went over to Bryant Park at 6 p.m. to see the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

It was the sixth day of the third annual Bryant Park Fall Festival, which features performances or talks for eight evenings running from some of New York's cultural treasures: the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Jazz at Linclon Center, the new Five Boroughs Music Festival, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, Parsons Dance, and tonight, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, now in its 57th season.

The orchestra should be soon announcing its new artistic director after a well-publicized search. Devoted to bringing music to the entire Brooklyn community, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, presents programs such as Music Off the Walls and Music Off the Shelves in partnership with, respectively, the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Public Library.

The park was really crowded this evening as the sun came out towards the end of the day. Someone saved us a seat near the front by the back of the library. At our last event at Bryant Park, we were around this spot too, but that was for a movie and we were then all the way in the back.

Tonight's musicians were Deborah Buck, violin; Robin Bushman, violin; Deborah Wang, violin; Ah Ling Neu, viola; Chris Finckel, cello; Gregg August, bass; and Paul Garment, clarinet/bass clarinet.

As Sarah Stevens, the Brooklyn Philharmonic's director of operations pointed out in her short introduction, tonight's Bryant Park program featured, in addition to Mozart's Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, K. 581, work by four living composers, all of them younger than we are.

First, Buck, Finckel and August played two selections from Appalachia Waltz (the program mistakenly said "Appalachian"), composers/musicians Mark O'Connor (fiddle) and Edgar Meyer's (double-bass) 1996 best-selling crossover album in collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma (cello, as if you didn't know), a pleasant blend of folk, bluegrass and European classical music that sounds kind of Irishy and medieval and which spawned a fast-moving neoclassical ballet by Miriam Mahdaviani; the musicians played O'Connor's title piece and Chief Sitting in the Rain, a reworking of a traditional bluegrass standard. It was really lovely.

The very smart Evan Ziporyn's Be-In, performed by Garment on bass-clarinet and the string quartet of Bushman, Wong, Neu and Finckel, was really enjoyable; reviewing the Ethel debut CD in The Guardian in 2004, John L. Walters called Be-In "a hypnotic, spiralling nine-minute journey with a tender conclusion that's both intellectually demanding and emotionally satisfying."

The Mozart Quintet for Clarinet and Strings (for this, Buck replaced Bushman on one of the violins) is always a crowd-pleaser (Benny Goodman played it right here in Bryant Park in 1952, and it's famous for being the piece Charles teaches the Chinese POW's just before they're blown up in the last episode of M*A*S*H), and tonight's performance of the first movement was expansive and subtle, the fourth movement enchanting - just as night began to fall.

Finally, the string sextet performed Weather One by Michael Gordon, who like Evan Ziporyn, is connected with "Bang on a Can" (back in 1987, we were at the MacDowell Colony with Bang on a Can's brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning [for the superb Little Match Girl Passion] co-founder David Lang, who was really funny at the dinner table). Weather One has some gorgeously dizzy swirling where the melody played by one instrument is then quickly taken up by another; it had the force of Thursday's Brooklyn tornado but we're happy to say all the trees in Bryant Park were still standing at its conclusion.

It was wonderful to be out in the park to listen to such terrific music played by the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Autumn is here, and there won't be many park performances soon, so we will try to savor this one for a long time. The Bryant Park Fall Festival's main sponsor is Bank of America, whose Tower at One Bryant Park made us look back and up several times during the performances; for our money, it's Manhattan's most beautiful skyscraper.