The scene

Philip Glass celebrates his 75th birthday at carnegie hall; at last, Riccardo chailly conducts the Boston symphony (in Prokofiev, Debussy and stravinsky); and Moby Dick comes to calgary

New York Carnegie Hall The Met Orchestra (January 15) American Composers Orchestra (January 31) It’s a good month for US music at Carnegie Hall: The Met’s principal conductor (and, if rumours are to be believed, James Levine’s future successor) Fabio Luisi brings the opera orchestra south a few blocks for its annual set of concerts above the pit. On showcase here is current principal clarinettist Anthony McGill and former principal Stephen Williamson (now chairing the clarinet for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) trading off with concertos by Copland and Corigliano. After lieder by Mahler, soprano Renée Fleming samples Barber’s two famous operas, Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, with a brief pit stop in Bernard Herrmann’s Wuthering Heights. At the end of the month, the ACO celebrates Philip Glass’s 75th birthday on the actual anniversary of his birth with the US premiere of the Carnegie co-commissioned Symphony No 9, preceded by the New York premiere of Arvo Pärt’s piano concerto and, in the composer’s words, ‘lament…for the living,’ Lamentate. Dennis Russell Davies leads the orchestra, with Maki Namekawa on piano for the Pärt. carnegiehall.org

New York Metropolitan Opera Götterdämmerung (January 27 — February 11) Robert Lepage’s controversial (and increasingly creaky) Ring cycle comes full circle with the fourth, and longest, instalment. Commonly referred to as ‘the Machine’, Lepage’s set — consisting of 24 planks and clocking in at 45 tonnes — will, it is promised, be used to its fullest extent in this six-hour extravaganza. Given the vertical rainbow bridge in Rheingold, galloping abstract horses in Die Walküre and rather inconsequential 3D imagery in Siegfried, it’ll be a tall order. Replacing the increasingly beleaguered James Levine, and thus marking the first complete Ring that hasn’t been led by Levine since 1989, Fabio Luisi conducts a cast that includes Deborah Voigt in her continued role debut as Brünnhilde, Eric Owens as Alberich, Hans-Peter König as Hagen and Waltraud Meier as Waltraute. Tenor Jay Hunter Morris, a pinch-hitter for the title-role in Siegfried at the Met last fall, returns as the fearless forger. metopera.org

Deborah voight: brings her first Brünnhilde to the Met

Dallas The Dallas Symphony Orchestra Goulding plays Sibelius (January 19-22) Now 19, Caroline Goulding has begun gracefully to shed her child prodigy status and is happily coming into her own as a skilled musician with impressive potential. She took home the Avery Fisher Career Grant last year and, with her 1720 Stradivarius in tow, brings the sonic Northern Lights of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto to the Lone Star State under the directorship of DSO debutant Pietari Inkinen. A virtuosic violinist in his own right and music director of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Inkinen shows off his captivating talent for the music of his native land (heard on several Naxos releases) with Sibelius’s Symphony No 5. Starting the programme is Manhattan Trilogy by Einojuhani Rautavaara, a living link in Finland’s vast and rich music scene between Sibelius and the contemporary likes of Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho. dallassymphony.com

BostoN Boston Symphony Orchestra Prokofiev, Debussy and Stravinsky (January 19-24) Hard to believe it, but this concert will mark the first time Italian maestro Riccardo Chailly takes g R e g H e l g e s o N

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Jacques lacombe: exploring the elements in New Jersey the podium at Symphony Hall with Boston’s finest. He doesn’t hold back with the musical offerings, plunging into Prokofiev’s alternatively sly and bombastic suite from The Love of Three Oranges as an aural amuse-bouche. The programme kicks into high gear with the Debussy’s rare ballet score Khamma, an Egyptologist’s dream infused with the influences of 20th-century exoticism and impressionism. Music from that era continues with Stravinsky’s riotous The Rite of Spring, a titanic work befitting Chailly’s equally indomitable personality. bso.org

PriNcetoN, Newark aND New BruNswick New Jersey Symphony Orchestra Fire: Light & Legend (January 20-22) Last year, in its inaugural season under music director Jacques Lacombe, the NJSO explored the shape-changing elements of water in its winter festival. They go further into the elements this year with Man & Nature, a three-concert series that explores the manifold facets of fire in music (other programmes earlier in the month included the Magic Fire Music and closing farewell from Die Walküre, in which Wotan surrounds his Valkyrie child Brünnhilde in a ring of flames, Prometheus: The Poem of Fire by Scriabin, and devilish selections from operas such as Faust, Der Freischütz and Orpheus in the Underworld). The meatiest line-up, however, comes with the finale. Lacombe and his company return to the myth of the fire-stealing Titan with Beethoven’s ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, featuring dancers and actors in the story-telling role. Preceding the piece is Haydn’s Fire Symphony No 9 and Kaija Saariaho’s searing cello concerto Notes on Light, the latter played by Finnish soloist Anssi Karttunen. njsymphony.org eDmoNtoN Edmonton Symphony Orchestra Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto (January 22) A trio of bright young things take over Alberta for an afternoon showcase. Canadian Music Competition laureate Scott MacIsaac, a soft-spoken and unassuming young man offstage who morphs into a commanding presence at the keyboard, here takes on Liszt’s Piano Concerto No 2. Principal trumpeter Robin Doyon has his own solo moment with Haydn’s iconic and effervescent Trumpet Concerto. Also on the docket are Andrew Reid’s Echoes of Time, a work produced through the orchestra’s 2011 Young Composers Project, along with Sibelius’s Valse triste and Schumann’s final Symphony No 4, under the assured baton of resident conductor, Lucas Waldin. edmontonsymphony.com moNtreal Montreal Symphony Orchestra Chamber Music: Quebec and France (January 24) While Montreal’s other symphony orchestra spends this month celebrating the province’s cosmopolitan population, the OSM focuses more finely on the links between Quebec and France with three works that tie together similarities between the two landscapes. Musicians from the orchestra, including violinists Ramsey Husser and Johannes Janssonius, violinist Natalie Racine, cellist Gary Russell and pianist Louise-Andrée Baril, plus baritone Stephen Hegedus and narrator James Hyndman, concoct a programme that features a new work, Création mondiale, by Régis Campo, a student of Grisey’s. The verse of French-Canadian poets Émile Nelligan and Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau serve as literary inspiration for this world premiere performance. Another piece, also Nelligan-based, is Claremont Pépin’s Suite No 1 for Violin, Cello and Piano. Finishing with a flourish, the musicians launch into Fauré’s Piano Quartet No 1 in C minor. osm.ca saN FraNcisco San Francisco Symphony Pinchas Zukerman (January 25-29) The baseball season is a long way off, but Pinchas Zukerman scores a triple play in the Golden City. While also conducting Mozart’s wonderfully popular Symphony No 40, Zukerman manages also to serve as violin soloist in the composer’s Adagio in E major (a replacement movement the composer had written for his fifth violin concerto for 18th-century soloist Antonio Brunetti), his fleet and sweet Rondo in C (another Brunetti commission) and the sprightly Violin Concerto No 3. To finish and grounding the forwardthinking Mozart in the 20th century, Zuckerman takes on the viola solo in Paul Hindemith’s Trauermusik, composed at short-notice to mark the death of England’s King George V. sfsymphony.org moNtreal Metropolitan Orchestra Brotherhood in Cosmopolitan Montreal (January 26) When the January 2010 earthquake struck Haiti, it hit Montréal’s population of 100,000 Haitians (the largest in Canada) very hard. Almost exactly two years later, the city’s second symphony orchestra pays its respects to its multicultural make-up with a global and spiritual programme. Russian-born conductor Aïrat Ichmouratov leads the orchestra, featuring Chinese erhu virtuoso Lan Tung, Canadian soprano and new-music champion Janice Jackson, Parisian pianist Patrice Laré and Quebecois Ensemble Kleztory. They kick off with Vancouverite Mark Armanini’s Heartland gramophone.co.uk

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