The new month has snuck up on me, but I’ve still been col­lect­ing rec­om­mended high­lights of what’s hap­pen­ing musi­cally, and some­times oth­er­wise, in New York City and through the wires:

The Russ­ian Stravin­sky fes­ti­val con­tin­ues through May 8, still with great pro­gram­ming, includ­ing all the old favorites (Petrushka, Le Sacre), the great and too lit­tle heard score for the bal­let Orpheus, Alec Bald­win nar­rat­ing A Soldier’s Tale and great sym­phonies.  The fes­ti­val has so far exceeded high expectations.

Stick­ing with the New York Phil­har­monic, at the end of the month they are giv­ing a staged per­for­mance of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, which may turn out to be the opera event of the sea­son.  This will actu­ally be the New York pre­miere of this great, scat­o­log­i­cal, scabrously funny anti-opera.  It’s anti only in the sense that it was made to offend those who think opera is all about divas and tuxe­doed patrons and Franco Zef­firelli pro­duc­tions.  It’s a great work, and to my mind a mis­chie­vous bit of cul­tural provo­ca­tion on behalf of the Phil towards the other Lin­coln Cen­ter insti­tu­tions.  I’d like to see some more fights, with music as the ammunition.

Stick­ing with geog­ra­phy, there are some more excel­lent events at Lin­coln Cen­ter in May.  The incom­pa­ra­ble Jordi Savall is pre­sent­ing two of his finest recent projects, Orient-Occident and Jerusalem on the 2nd and 3rd.  On the 22nd and 23rd, Gus­tavo Dudamel, world’s hottest con­duc­tor, brings the LA Phil­har­monic in for pro­grams that include the local pre­miere of John Adams new City Noir.

As an adjunct to the Stravin­sky fes­ti­val, and an astound­ingly beau­ti­ful and ful­fill­ing art form in it’s own right, the New York City Bal­let sched­ule begins in May.  They will be pre­sent­ing a gen­er­ous help­ing of the works of Bal­an­chine and Stravin­sky, per­haps the great­est achieve­ments in human cul­ture, as well as an exten­sive pro­gram of other works.  While all arts aspire to music, per­son­ally I feel all music aspires to ballet.

Fur­ther afield, and eas­ier on the wal­let (because that mat­ters too), there are some intrigu­ing events:

May 28 — The Dream Broth­ers, in con­junc­tion with Amer­i­can Opera Projects, present their orig­i­nal songs to words by Walt Whit­man.  This is for every­one who con­sid­ers them­selves an Amer­i­can, or even just a Brook­lynite.  In Fort Greene, by dona­tion, no one turned away. Go.

May 12 — Ded­i­cated music blog­ger Feast of Music has orga­nized his own con­cert series.  The next event fea­tures Kyk­los and The Kon­tra­band.  A great exam­ple of being a free fuck­ing agent, a bar­gain and some­thing you’ll feel good about sup­port­ing while you dig the music.

And free, May 21 and 22, the Amer­i­can Com­posers Orches­tra is offer­ing new music in the 19th annual Under­wood New Music Read­ings series.  You’ll hear brand new music essen­tially at the moment it’s first being played.

In new record­ings, the month has releases of CDs on New Ams­ter­dam from Matt Marks and Corey Dargel (lis­ten to sam­ples of Dargel and Marks).  I’ll be review­ing these before they come out, but they are highly rec­om­mended by The Big City.  Also, the excel­lent jazz cou­ple of Frank Carl­berg and Chris­tine Cor­rea each have record­ings com­ing out (also to be reviewed) and they are ter­rif­i­cally strong.  There’s a new Mahler set from Naxos col­lect­ing their pre­vi­ous record­ings, and it’s solid to excel­lent, at a good price.  And on the local front, stay tuned for live blog­ging from Vox on May 1, a long form arti­cle on City Opera with an inter­view with George Steel, an explo­ration of the media suc­cess of the San Fran­cisco Sym­phony, a LOT of classical/jazz/new music CD reviews, con­tin­ued Treme blog­ging and, once the drilling on my build­ing stops, The Big City Pod­casts will debut!  Stay thirsty, my friends …