You'll find yourself transported to 1920’s Paris and the era of Le Jazz Hot during this screening of the fantastical Oscar-nominated animated film The Triplets Of Belleville. Join us for a wild spectacle featuring dancing, singing, sound effects, and the original hot swing score performed live by its composer Benoît Charest and his eight-piece Orchestre Terrible de Belleville band.

BODYTRAFFIC is helping establish Los Angeles as a major center for contemporary dance. Founded in 2007 by Lillian Rose Barbeito and Tina Finkelman Berkett, BODYTRAFFIC has surged to the forefront of the concert dance world, recruiting great talent from around the globe to create world-class contemporary dance by distinctive choreographic voices. See them here in their only NY-area appearance!

All music comes from the heart, but some clearly emerges from a composer’s most personal space. Composers from four eras and four cultures combine for this rare program which finds each of them at emotional heights.

Composer/pianist Daniel Kelly transforms the stories of everyday people into dramatic and compelling music that has delighted audiences around the country. During this unique performance, audiences will hear the dreams, hopes, and struggles of local first-generation students in recorded interviews that are seamlessly blended with original compositions performed by Kelly’s ensemble of NYC’s finest jazz musicians.

Teatro Nuovo presents a semi-staged performance of Bellini’s second opera to reach America, La Straniera (The Stranger). The late Philip Gossett called La Straniera Bellini’s “most radical opera.” It is one of the most gorgeously melodic scores in all of opera, and at the same time one of the most uncompromisingly focused on psychological drama.

Teatro Nuovo presents a semi-staged performance of Rossini’s opera, La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie). With its familiar overture, this “slice of life” opera paved the way for everything from La Traviata to Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci.

In a single decade, with works such as The Firebird and The Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky showed possibilities for musical extremism never before imagined. With bracing harmonies, infectious rhythms, and brilliant orchestration, everything that Stravinsky created in this fertile period stole the musical show of the era, and this trio arrangement of The Soldier’s Tale (Stravinsky’s own) introduced his wildly controversial music to the chamber music stage. Innovations abound in this program: Beethoven’s Clarinet Trio (the first of its kind), Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words (his own invention), and Smetana’s Piano Trio, the first major chamber work from the Bohemian region.

Experience the grace, wit, and charm of French music. The program begins and ends with early works by Saint-Saëns and Fauré that recreate the elegant atmosphere of 19-century Parisian salons. In between, the Ravel sonata, written soon after World War I, uses just two string instruments to produce a composition of unique, austere beauty. These three inimitable works capture the essence of pure melody in its most delightfully fundamental form.

A feast for the eyes and ears, Bartók’s ingenious creation stands alone in the chamber music literature, an astonishing synthesis of percussion and keyboard. Also featured on the program are two more milestones: Dohnányi’s delectable Serenade, the 20th century’s first string trio, and Tchaikovsky’s String Sextet ne plus ultra, “Souvenir de Florence.”

Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet holds a rightful place in the line of great piano quintets going back to Schumann’s of 1842. Combining the rigor of Bach with the powerful energy and extreme irony of Soviet era music, the work is a milestone not only of chamber music but also of Shostakovich’s career: it won him the coveted Stalin Prize. This essential quintet is accompanied by a youthful Beethoven sonata and Mendelssohn’s appropriately tempestuous First Piano Trio.